Women of North Buxton and the Elgin Settlement

Maggie Collins
by A.C. Robbins

The story of Mrs. Maggie Collins was brought to mind by the finding of an old newspaper clipping taken from a 1934 Toronto Star Weekly, in which she had been interviewed and had told of one of the small revolutions in Haiti.

She’s been dead now for over forty years but the stories she told us still insight the same awe in my mind as they did when I first heard them. For in her youth, Mrs. Collins had walked the streets of Haiti when revolution was fermenting ; had felt the warm life-blood of a young man gush across her feet as he sprawled dying in the street; had known the sickness and the oppression of the cane fields of Haiti which were surpassed only in their cruelty by the cotton fields of the south. and she had known all of this before she was ten years old.

She had been born Margaret Rebecca Neal in St. John’s, New Brunswick in 1852. By 1861, she and her thirteen year old brother Arthur and her aunt Mary were living in Raleigh Township. But in the years in between, she had seen more tragedy than most people see in a lifetime. Her family was one of the many families of blacks who had been talked into going to Haiti. When these families wanted to return to Canada, they were prevented by guns and whips in the hands of overseers as if they were in slavery. This resulted in their “escaping” by any means possible . Margaret’s family is believed to have perished under these conditions. Her mother’s sister Mary took little Maggie and her brother in hand and somehow they eventually found their way here.

But even more tragedy was in store for Maggie. She would lose her young husband in a saw mill accident and three of her four children in their early years. Her surviving child Harriet, would one day marry John Cromwell and become the mother of Eva, Theolia and Oliver.

Margaret later married Ezekiel Collins. She was an old lady nearing her eighties when I knew her. Old Mrs. Collins, as we called her lived next door to the B.M.E. Church where, wearing her dust cap and long apron, she proudly performed the menial chores of caring for the Church and the School. She had watched many preachers and teachers come and go from these institutions. And with the privilege of the aged, made no bones about those she liked and those she disliked. She called them as saw them. Her years of widowhood had sharpened her wits and she took a keen delight in the comfiting of her enemies. She was a staunch supporter of the Church and remained active in its affairs.

Ironically she carried water every day from the school for all her home, never dreaming that one of the best wells in Buxton would be found on her property after her death.

No doubt she saw in us the little ones she’d lost so many years ago for she had a soft spot for children and would tell us her stories. We would vie for the privilege of carrying her broom as she walked to and from the school, asking and expecting no other reward other than her crinkly smile and another story.

Then one day the burden of her years proved too great and the busy hands were still at last. But when she died in 1936, she took with her the first memories of another page of our History.

This appeared in the 1978 edition of the North Buxton Labour Day book.