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to the United States. As a result,
     by the middle of the nineteenth century, small black settlements and black enclaves
     inside larger cities dotted the Canadian landscape, giving James Smith a range of
     places to put down roots or search for Fanny.
    The most famous black enclave was the nine-thousand-acre Elgin Settlement in Kent
     County, which includes the present-day village of North Buxton. It was organized in
     1849 by the Reverend William King of Louisiana and fifteen of his former slaves. King
     raised the money to purchase land in what was then Raleigh Township and sold the settlers
     fifty-acre lots for $125—payable over a ten-year period at 6 percent interest. They
     became the nucleus of a colony of self-sufficient black American fugitives who swore
     off liquor, soaked up Greek and Latin, planted flower gardens, provided their own
     tools and raised corn, wheat, tobacco, hemp, maple sugar, cows, sheep and hogs. They
     also put up picket fences and built homes set back at least thirty-three feet from
     the road and containing at least four rooms. Tiger lilies were among their favorite
     plants, perhaps because they, like these black settlers, loved the full sun and could
     flourish in almost any soil.
    The Dawn Settlement near Dresden straddled the Sydenham River and included about 623
     acres of rich fertile land, heavy timber and unbroken forests. In the early 1840s,
     the Reverend Josiah Henson—a fugitive slave and the model for novelist Harriet BeecherStowe’s
     Uncle Tom—purchased land there with the help of abolitionists. In 1842, Henson and
     white abolitionist Hiram Wilson established Dawn. It included a school, a sawmill,
     a brickyard, a rope factory, black walnut orchards and a gristmill. Black communities
     also sprang up in Sandwich, which organized a Union Sabbath School by February 1851;
     Windsor, Amherstburg, London, the Queen’s Bush, Brantford, Wilberforce (now Lucan),
     founded in 1829–1830 by blacks from Cincinnati as a New Jerusalem; along the Niagara
     Peninsula at St. Catharine’s, Niagara Falls, Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and Fort
     Erie; Hamilton and Toronto; and the northern perimeter of Simcoe and Grey Counties,
     especially in Oro, Collingwood and Owen Sound.
    While traveling around the country, James Smith met many fugitive slaves. He told
     them where he came from and how he had been separated from his wife for praying. One
     day, he met a man who changed his life. He told Smith about a woman living in Sandwich,
     now a part of Windsor. This woman, Smith learned, had come from his home near Richmond
     and had belonged once to a man with the same name as Smith’s former owner.
    The next day, Smith journeyed to the house in Sandwich where he had been told the
     woman lived. By 1855, Sandwich had twenty-two black refugee families, according to
     historian Benjamin Drew. Henry Bibb’s wife, Mary, taught twenty-five students in her
     home. However, James Smith wasn’t worried about the size of Sandwich’s black population,
     the extent of its services or even how often slave catchers slipped across the Detroit
     River to the river-bordering community. His eyes were on the woman at the house, the
     woman whose face looked like his wife’s. He offered her his hand and called her by
     her old Virginia name.
    “Oh, is this my beloved husband whom I never again expected to see?” she answered.
    According to Bibb, “her eyes sparkled and flashed like strokes of lightning upon his
     furrowed cheeks and wrinkled brow.”
    They embraced, no doubt remembering the last time they’d seen each other—the day Fanny
     had tried to console him but had collapsed in tears, the day James had been led off
     to Georgia in chains for the crime of praying too much. Not only had they spent most
     of their adult lives apart; their children had been scattered, sold here and there,
     lost. Oh, they had plenty of reasons to weep. But in 1847, Fanny had managed to escape
     from Kentucky and