William King, a Scots-Irish/American Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, had organized the Elgin Association to buy 9,000 acres of land for resettlement of the refugees, to give them a start in Canada.

Buxton was visited by a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune in 1857, and by the head of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in the summer of 1863, established after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had freed many enslaved people in the American South during the Civil War.

North Buxton's historic population peaked at more than 2000, almost exclusively descendants of free Black people and fugitive slaves who had escaped the United States via the Underground Railroad.

[7][8] In the years before the American Civil War, these refugee enslaved people usually reached Canada via the Underground Railroad from the United States.

Thousands had been settling in Southwest Ontario, as it was easily reached from a number of midwestern states and Western New York.

Among the notable residents was William Parker, a leader of the Christiana Resistance in 1851 in the free state of Pennsylvania, where he and his neighbors fought off a party trying to capture four fugitive slaves from Maryland.

[7] During the late years of the American Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863 freed many enslaved peoples in the South, a Freedmen's Inquiry Commission was established by the Secretary of War to gather information about the "condition and capacity" of the "population just set free.

Yerrinton, as secretary and reporter, visited numerous communities in Canada West (present-day Ontario) during the summer of 1863 to gather information about the many former American slaves who had gained freedom and settled there.

In the nineteenth century, the community operated three schools; the former enslaved people placed emphasis on education and literacy for adults and children as the key to progress.