Builders of the GTA: Thornton Blackburn, forever on the road to freedom

Posted February 18, 2021 12:34 pm.
Last Updated February 18, 2021 12:57 pm.
By the 1830s Thornton Blackburn was a successful businessman in Toronto, but it was a far cry from his start in life.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Blackburn was only three years old when he was taken from his mother and sold into slavery. As a toddler, the man who would launch Toronto’s first taxi business became the property of the postmaster, William Murphy.
“He was actually given as a gift to Murphy’s nine year old son,” says historian Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost.
Dr. Frost chronicled Thornton Blackburn’s life in her 2007 book entitled “I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land,” winner of the Governor General’s prize for non-fiction. After years of slavery, Thornton staged a daring daylight escape from his owners, fleeing north with his wife Lucie.
“They had forged freedom papers, they got on a steamboat in Lousiville Harbour the day before Independance Day, 1831 and got all the way up to Detroit, Michigan”, says Dr. Frost.
Two years later a man from Louisville recognized Blackburn and he and Lucie were arrested. Unable to prove they were free people they were held in jail for Kentucky slave hunters. Lucie was able to escape with the help of a visitor to the jail.
“Two church ladies on a Sunday went into the jail and one of them changed clothes with Lucie,” recounts Frost. Lucie was then spirited across the Detroit River to safety just outside Windsor in Upper Canada. Thornton was freed when members of the Black community staged a protest as part of the Blackburn Riots and stormed the jail. Blackburn was briefly arrested in Upper Canada, but Lieutenant-Governor Major General Sir John Colborne refused to extradite Blackburn to the U-S arguing that a lifetime of slavery was too severe a punishment for his crime.
Their extradition case and their resistance to re-enslavement… altered Canadian extradition law for all time”
~ Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost
Thornton Blackburn eventually made his way to Toronto and while working as a waiter at Osgoode Hall realized people in the city needed an easier way to navigate the city’s muddy streets. He hired the local locksmith to build him a four-person horse carriage which he turned into a successful taxi business. Blackburn eventually bought 6 Toronto houses and sheltered other former slaves seeking freedom on the famed Underground Railroad. In the late 1830’s he even returned to Kentucky in a dangerous mission to rescue his mother also bringing her back to Toronto.
Thornton Blackburn died in 1890 and is buried at Toronto’s Necropolis Cemetery.