Hiram Wilson
Hiram Wilson (September 25, 1803 – April 16, 1864) was an anti-slavery abolitionist who worked directly with escaped and former slaves in southwestern Ontario.
[2] He resigned from the British-American Institute and moved to St. Catharines, Ontario, where his home was a final terminal for the Underground Railroad.
Lane rebel Theodore Dwight Weld responded: But in solemn earnest, I ask, why should not theological students investigate and discuss the sin of slavery?...
[7]This group of students left Lane and journeyed to the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute, which replaced the financially troubled Oneida as the most abolitionist college in the country.
[1] After he graduated, the President of Oberlin, Charles Finney, was interested in the status of freedom seekers who settled in Upper Canada (Ontario) to escape slavery and discrimination.
[9] Wilson travelled through the province from the fall through the spring of that year and returned to the United States to act as a delegate of Upper Canada at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
[10] Wilson's primary goal for Upper Canada was to establish schools for blacks, but open to anyone desiring an education.
Quaker philanthropist James Canning Fuller, from Skaneateles, New York, was also interested in the strides that Wilson had made in Ontario.
[1] June 1838, Wilson and Josiah Henson called a convention of Black Canadians to discuss building a school and what should be taught.
[13] The Canada Mission Board gave approval for Wilson and Henson to find a site that would be safe for fugitives.
[15] On December 12, 1841, Hiram Wilson joined Josiah Henson and James Canning Fuller to establish the British-American Institute, which served as a manual labor college in the Dawn settlement.
[19] The idea of a manual labour school seemed to be practical; however, the founders of the institute failed to secure long- term finances and resources.
Wilson wrote in 1850 that, "The Manuel Training Institute here ran well for a season, and accomplished much good; but since my resignation [in 1847] ...and the decease of James Cannings Fuller, one of the Trustees, it has run down, and can hardly be resuscitated again without a miracle".
[20] In 1843, Wilson attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention, in London, where he was the "Central Corresponding Committee for the Coloured Population of Canada.
Benjamin Drew in 1855 wrote about Wilson and his family: ...a distinguished, self-denying philanthropist ... With him the refugee finds a welcome and a home; the port stranger is pointed by him to the means of honorable self-support, and from him receives wise counsel and religious instruction...I have seen the Negro- the fugitive slave, wearied with his thousand miles of traveling by night, without suitable shelter meanwhile for rest by day, who had trodden the roughest and most unfrequented ways, fearing, with too much cause, an enemy in every human being who had crossed his path; I have seen such arrive at Mr.
The Reverend Daniel A. Payne described her "as a woman of uncommon faith and powerful in prayer, well suited to be the wife of a missionary.
