ACHH2: A Rural Black Island Community (Cardigan) Traditional Cache
Hidden : 1/25/2024
Difficulty:
1.5 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: small (small)

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Geocache Description:


Welcome to Atlantic Canada’s Hidden Histories (ACHH) Geotour!

  You’ve located another stop in this set of geocaches that are part of the GeoTour (click).

This is one of the first ACHH2 caches to be published in Prince Edward Island & is being published in celebration of Black History Month 2024.

  About this Location

When Islanders talk about Black history, they often think of Charlottetown — “The Bog” -- but for many years, King’s County contained the largest Black population outside the provincial capital.

Slavery existed on PEI (see Note below) , and descendants of Black African slaves settled on a section of the Seven Mile Road the locals referred to a “Darkies Hollow”. The 1881 census of PEI shows that a dozen Black families, made up of more than sixty individuals, were living around the communities of Souris, Cardigan and Montague.

David and Keisha (Wilson) Shepard were Black Islanders that settled there.They were one of the first enslaved couples to arrive on the Island in 1786 as listed in the Book of Negroes (a British naval ledger that lists the names of Black Loyalists who came to Canada during the American Revolutionary War between 1775-1783). David had been enslaved first to a Southern plantation owner (William Shepard, who christened him with his last name) and later to General Edmund Fanning (who became the 2nd lieutenant-governor of St. John’s Island, later named PEI). It was Fanning who freed David and Keisha and granted the family property on the Seven Mile Road.

David died a free man and Keisha remarried a former slave — Samuel Martin — and together they started "The Bog", a Black Community of former slaves located in Charlottetown.

While the “Darkies Hollow” that was once vibrant with wildlife, trees, brooks, and twisted paths that the locals traveled through and played on has since been cleared for blueberry fields, descendants of the original settlers, the Shepards, still reside in the area.

Note: Slavery was not a common institution on the Island, but following the coming of the Loyalists it was not at all unusual for the wealthier inhabitants of the colony to possess one or more black servants. Slavery had been given legal sanction in the colony by a 1781 act which stated that all Black or mixed race servants who had come to the Island as slaves or who might be imported in the future would continue in bondage until freed by their masters.

References: “A part of P.E.I.’s Black history” by Stella Shepard. The Guardian 13 February 2021 and "An Act declaring that Baptism of Slaves shall not exempt them from Bondage", 21 George III Ch. XV (1781)


Atlantic Canada’s Hidden Histories (ACHH) GeoTour is a collaborative project between the City of Fredericton, National Trust for Canada, the Capital Region Association of Geocachers, the Association of Nova Scotia Geocaching, and Prince Edward Island.. We acknowledge that caches of this tour are placed in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. The territory of the Mi’kmaq people are recognized in the Peace and Friendship Treaties to establish an ongoing relationship of peace, friendship and mutual respect between equal nations.

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