Dock Street in Shelburne, N.S., is a picturesque waterfront walk lined with historic wood frame buildings painted in a rainbow of colours. Houses, shops and industrial sites tell the story of the British Loyalists — white colonists who had fled to the area starting in 1783, following the defeat of the British in the American Revolutionary War.
An additional 2,000 free Black people, known as Black Loyalists, also came to Shelburne after fighting for the British in exchange for their freedom from enslavement — a part of history famously chronicled in Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes.
Visitors to Shelburne who walk along Dock Street can find information on the town’s merchants, printers, shipbuilders and other early Loyalist settlers through a series of plaques that explain the history of the buildings and the people who lived and worked there.
One of the historic markers lining Dock Street in Shelburne, N.S., honours a ‘ship owner and West Indies trade merchant’ without mentioning the slave trade. (Lyndsey Beutin photo)
Something visitors won’t find, though, is information about the Black presence along the waterfront and the history of slavery — even though many of the white Loyalists owned enslaved people and brought them when the region was settled, expanding slavery in the area.
That’s something Lyndsey Beutin, an associate professor in the Communication Studies and Media Arts department, wants to change.
Beutin’s research focuses on Black history museums and museums that tell the story of slavery. As part of an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), she’s been working with the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, a museum located in Birchtown, N.S., close to Shelburne — the place where many Black Loyalists lived, and which eventually became the largest free Black community in British North America.
In 2024, she did a workshop with community members — many of whom are volunteers at the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre and descendants of the town’s original Black Loyalist settlers — exploring how the land in Birchtown could be a key part of telling the entwined stories of Black liberation struggle and settler colonialism beyond traditional museum exhibits.
“We did our first workshop on the bay in Birchtown, which was a segregated Black area of town back then and is now preserved as a Black burial ground and National Historic Site,” she explains.
“We did some really powerful land-based memory projects – trying to use the land to get people who live there and who are descendants to tell stories about what the place means to them.”
Last summer, she wanted to do something similar — and set her sights on Dock Street.
“One of the really big claims to fame of Shelburne is the shipping history — the idea that it used to be a really powerful port city, and there’s a proud tradition of shipbuilding,” Beutin says.
“So currently on Dock Street, they have signage that says, ‘This person was a shipbuilder, and this person was a merchant,’ and it’s all about the maritime economy. Well, all those people were white and all of them were involved in the slave trade.”
Whether through importing or purchasing goods produced by enslaved people, or actually owning them, the town’s complicity in the slave trade was widespread.
And yet the phrase “slave trade” appears nowhere in the entire historical waterfront, says Beutin — and, against a backdrop of strong white Loyalist pride, including an annual parade, the history of Shelburne’s involvement with slavery isn’t visible.
Lyndsey Beutin leads a group exercise on the politics of collective memory with an existing historic plaque that marks the Loyalist landing in Shelburne in 1783. (Photo by Gary Weekes)
Not that the Black Loyalists are completely absent, says Beutin, but the prevailing narrative focuses on the fact that nearby Birchtown was a settlement of free Black people, and ignores the presence of slavery in Shelburne.
So Beutin worked with Andrea Davis, the director of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, and New Brunswick-based historian Graham Nickerson — both descendants of Black Loyalists — to “re-interpret” Dock Street with a community walking tour. It focuses on the history of slavery, free Black maritime life and labour, the Indigenous presence in the area, and the living memory of Black Loyalist descendants.
“The very first time I went to Shelburne I had a vision of what I wanted to do there, but it took four years of building relationships, getting to know people, learning, and building trust to do it,” Beutin says. “That process has been just as important and meaningful as the research itself.”
Beutin and Nickerson are now analyzing data from the workshops, and are planning to publish scholarly research on the use of land-based and place-based methods to challenge historical narratives and build deeper community relationships.
To make the historical research more accessible, the team is also planning to make the walking tour publicly available in a digital format.
“I think of this as a spatial intervention — and it probably would have never happened if we’d done it as a formal signage project,” explains Beutin.
“But because it was place-based, community-based, relationship-based, we were able to do it, and now we have something to show for it.”