Sophia Pooley

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Sophia Burthen Pooley was born around 1772 in Fishkill, New York, and was enslaved there before being forced to Canada by Mohawk chief Joseph Brant. Her firsthand account appears in the 1856 book The Refugee, making her one of the few enslaved people in Canada to tell their story directly.

She was kidnapped as a child, around 1778, when slavers blindfolded her and her sister and took them to Upper Canada. Pooley lived with Brant near the Six Nations of the Grand River for about 20 years. She learned Mohawk, joined Brant’s family on hunting trips, and remained close to the household, though she was kept as a slave. She also described abuse by Catherine Brant, Brant’s wife.

In 1807 she was sold to a man named Samuel Hatt in Ancaster for $100. Slavery was not yet outlawed in Canada at that time, but Pooley later said Hatt did not try to enforce the law, and she escaped to what is now Queen’s Bush in Waterloo.

In 1855, American abolitionist Benjamin Drew traveled through Canada West to collect Black Canadians’ experiences of slavery. Pooley, then in her late 70s or 80s, provided the only known first-person account of a Canadian enslaved person for Drew. Drew published these testimonies in The Refugee in 1856.

Pooley later married a Black farmer named Robert Pooley in Waterloo, but the marriage ended when he left for a white woman. There is no record of any children. She died in 1860 in Peel Township, in her late eighties or around ninety.

Her life has been shared in museum exhibits, including a 2009 display at the Royal Ontario Museum about Enslaved Africans in Upper Canada, and in programs at the Joseph Brant Museum in 2014. Since 2019, Hamilton has explored honoring Pooley with a permanent plaque, though progress has faced delays, including the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, she was highlighted on city walk banners as part of We Are Hamilton — Black History Remembered, and work continues with Hamilton Civic Museums and the Afro Canadian Caribbean Association to place a permanent plaque.