08/18/2026
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"In 1783, thousands of formerly enslaved people arrive in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, promised freedom by the British for their loyalty.
Over 3,000 of them settle in a place called Birchtown, making it the largest free Black settlement anywhere in North America.
The welcome doesn't last. In July 1784, mobs in nearby Shelburne riot against the Black Loyalists for over a week, driving families from their homes in what's often called the first race riot in North American history.
By the 1980s, almost none of this is taught in Nova Scotia schools.
Elizabeth Cromwell, a caseworker supervisor with the local Children's Aid Society and a descendant of the Birchtown settlers herself, discovers just how deep the silence runs.
She's helping local children with a school genealogy assignment when she realizes something troubling: there's almost nothing for them to find.
No records, no lessons, no acknowledgment that their ancestors built one of the most significant free Black communities in the country.
"When I went to school, it was never taught," she says later.
Around the same time, a different threat appears. A landfill is proposed near Birchtown, one that would destroy archaeological remains sitting under the ground where Cromwell's own family has lived for generations.
Cromwell helps found the Shelburne County Cultural Awareness Society to fight it.
The campaign works. The landfill is stopped, and the effort grows into something bigger: the Black Loyalist Heritage Society.
Money is scarce from the start. "Money is always short when we come to the table," Cromwell tells reporters years later. "But it's time for Canadians to step up and take ownership of this history."
Archaeologists dig near her own family home and pull out more than 10,000 artifacts dating to the late 1700s. In 1996, the society secures Birchtown's designation as a National Historic Site.
By 2000, a small museum opens in the town's Old Schoolhouse, the first physical home for two decades of Cromwell's research.
Here's what makes it worse: in March 2006, someone sets that building on fire.
Investigators later report a car speeding away from the scene. The blaze destroys computer hard drives, filing cabinets, and boxes of documents, nearly 20 years of genealogical research, up in smoke in a single night.
Novelist Lawrence Hill visits the society's offices repeatedly in the years leading up to this, digging through Cromwell's records for a book he's writing.
He later says it was at the Black Loyalist Heritage Society that he first laid eyes on a copy of the actual historical Book of Negroes, the 18th-century ledger his eventual bestselling novel is named after.
Cromwell doesn't quit after the fire. The society spends six years raising $4.3 million to rebuild.
June 6, 2015. The new Black Loyalist Heritage Centre opens in Birchtown, roughly 10,000 square feet of exhibits, archives, and genealogy records built to replace everything the arson took.
"It's hard to believe that we've actually reached the point where we're actually going to celebrate the opening of this building," Cromwell tells CBC that weekend.
In 2017, Canada appoints Cromwell to the Order of Canada. Two years later, Nova Scotia adds the Order of Nova Scotia.
Elizabeth Cromwell dies on October 2, 2019, at age 75, survived by four sons and a daughter, having served on the society's board until the very end.
"I do believe that we in Nova Scotia have lost a really great visionary," says Cynthia Dorrington, the centre's site manager, after her death.
A school assignment that turned up nothing became, over three decades, a national historic site, a rebuilt museum, and a body of research that helped shape one of Canada's most celebrated novels. Cromwell never let the silence around her ancestors stay silent.
She led the society's board for most of those decades, stepping back briefly around 2002 before returning in 2008 and staying involved for good. Among the society's founding members was her own husband, Everett, working alongside her from the very beginning. Since the new centre opened, it has welcomed more than 40,000 visitors, many of them Nova Scotians tracing a family tree that, without Cromwell's decades of work, might never have led anywhere at all.
Someone who needs to know - history doesn't preserve itself, someone has to insist on it."
