Janet Ewing’s ball gown

If your household was ever among the couple of to own a century-old ball dress, possibilities are Cynthia Cooper understands about it.

The manager of gown, style and fabrics at the McCord Stewart Social History Museum in Montreal has for 3 years been studying the method garments formed past individuals’s lives.

In the fall of 2021, while Cooper was examining some of the museum’s archives for an approaching exhibit on 19th- and 20th-century outfit balls, she came throughout an image of a gown she had actually not seen before.

The dress is made from light blue silk, embroidered with flower detailing and a cream-coloured lace collar and lace cuffs. It hung loosely on the female using it and appeared to go back to the 1700s, though the image was taken at an outfit ball in 1927.

When a Canada-wide explore museum collections showed up absolutely nothing, Cooper grew interested and more identified to discover the dress.

“It ended up being a little bit of a fascination,” Cooper stated inside the McCord Stewart’s library, which incorporates her workplace and is where she carries out much of her research study. “Most things of this date remain in museums.”

This one, she wound up tracking to a basement in a town in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains.

Revealing the history of a gown and its ties to slavery in Canada:

Cooper traced its journey from Colonial Virginia to New York, to Shelburne, N.S., then Quebec City. She found the gown had actually followed a comparable migration path to among the very first and biggest Black neighborhoods in Canada which the household to whom it belonged had more than likely owned a shackled individual explained just as “Bob” in a 1772 tax sheet.

The gown belonged to a white female, for Cooper, it shows “archival silences” of 2 populations taking a trip together with each other– Black and white Loyalists– individuals whose lives were going through extensive modifications, however whose fortunes were worlds apart.

The female in the 1927 picture called the gown’s initial owner in a paper’s society pages, stating it came from her grandma’s great-great-grandmother: Janet Ewing.

Records exposed Ewing had actually been wed to a baker, John Ewing, which they both passed away in Quebec City, however resided in Shelburne before that.

Cooper states John Ewing’s recorded existence in Shelburne “might just imply something: that he was a refugee from the American Revolution.”

She recognized Shelburne was likewise the location where 3,000 Black Loyalists settled, over half of whom were guaranteed flexibility if they defended the British in the American Revolutionary War.

That pledge, made in Lord Dunmore’s 1775 Proclamation to avoid disobedience, was frequently broken due to prevalent bigotry. The chances to own land, have quality work and even monetary reparations were primarily kept from Black Loyalists.

“It is within that system that there is a reasonable quantity of re-enslavement,” stated Amani Whitfield, a history teacher at the University of Calgary, whose comprehensive research study on slavery in the Maritimes has actually led to 5 books on the topic.

Cooper started to question if John Ewing, even as a baker, might have owned a servant. She discovered more files with his name on them, consisting of tax records called tithables where citizens paid taxes to the church.

Searching for Bob

“Wherever there’s a single name in these tithables lists, it shows that that’s a shackled individual,” Cooper stated.

A tithables list dated 1772 consisted of Ewing’s complete name, another complete name listed below it and after that merely, “Bob.”

Cooper could not discover a record of Bob anywhere else. He wasn’t in the Book of Negroes, the file produced by the British listing names and descriptions of 3,000 Black refugees signed up on boats cruising from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783, and the motivation for Lawrence Hill’s 2007 successful book.

Amani Whitfield composed the Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes. Released in 2022, it consists of the names and descriptions of almost 1,500 enslaved individuals, however no matching Bob.

Cooper plans to dig additional and effort for more information about Bob. In the meantime, all she understands is that for him to have actually been taped on the tithables list, he would have been at least 16 years of ages.

The invisibility cast on such big parts of history suggests that in Bob’s case, “there are lots of, numerous things we’ll never ever understand,” stated Cooper, including that hypothesizing about his life or the lives of other enslaved individuals at the time “provides us insight into the experiences of this group of individuals and the lots of things that took place as this turmoil of emancipation started.”

Something that took place in Shelburne amongst this turmoil was a riot, perhaps the very first race riot in North America. The city was settled in a matter of months by countless Loyalists. It had actually turned into one of the greatest cities in North America and yet was more like a “modern-day refugee camp,” according to Whitfield.

The city government was sluggish to approve land, so locals resided in camping tents throughout the winter season. When land was approved, it hardly ever went to Black homeowners, requiring them to work for white individuals for low incomes and frequently just to have actually those salaries kept.

Over a number of days in July 1784, mad mobs of white individuals in Shelburne assaulted Black homeowners and burned their homes down.

What’s in a gown?

What the Ewings did or believed throughout the riot is lost to history. A residential or commercial property loss claim submitted in the months ahead of time recommends their company wasn’t getting off the ground the method they ‘d hoped.

They still had the blue silk dress. Ranging from war didn’t stop the Ewings from bring it with them from Virginia to Nova Scotia and after that Quebec City. A change to the gown bringing it approximately date with 1780s style supplies hints about the function it bet the Ewings.

“A great deal of Loyalists were encouraged by social movement,” stated Bonnie Lynn Huskins, who teaches females’s and gender history at the University of New Brunswick.

The gown, Huskins stated, “embodies a great deal of their aspirational hopes and dreams for a more cultured life.”

Not unlike servant ownership, the objective was to develop wealth.

“Part of the Loyalist dream consisted of enslavement,” Huskins stated. “That’s part of the Loyalist dream we do not normally consider.”

Whitfield states that while slavery in the Maritimes utilized to be viewed as more good-hearted than on Southern plantations, it’s more pertinent to comprehend what was at its root: “the exploitation and usage of Black labour.”

The gown likewise offered Janet Ewing with a function in developing that aura of gentility at balls and banquets, a minimum of among which in Shelburne was held outdoors amongst tree stumps.

“We do not have a great deal of files from females. We need to depend on either their actions or possibly– what they bring with them,” stated Huskins, who has actually pieced together the stories of Loyalist females who stood apart in Shelburne. Some ran inns or pubs. One account included a female delivering in a camping tent.

A bakeshop in Quebec City

6 years after Ewing stated his bakeshop was stopping working, the household left Shelburne for Quebec City in 1790, when a bakeshop increased for sale there.

The gown was given from mom to child up until it landed in the hands of Eileen Peters, who had no kids and no other half to subsume her identity. She passed away of a speedy health problem in 1984.

There it sat in a cabinet in the basement of the home she constructed in the Laurentians up until a relative discovered it at the demand of Cynthia Cooper.

“She passed away rather unexpectedly and wasn’t able to explain it or a few of the other things she left,” stated Tim Peters, 83, a nephew, who with his sibling Gordon chose to contribute the dress to the McCord Stewart Museum when Cooper tracked it down.

Eileen Peters, unlike her female forefathers, left a mark on the general public record. There is a medical fellowship at McGill University in her name. She loved fly fishing, was on the board of the Victorian Order of Nurses and made big contributions to Montreal charities.

Peters and her mom Norah used the gown at 1920s outfit balls, where members of the elite dressed up as colonial figures with a fond memories Cooper and her coworkers are working to shed a vital light on today.

Pictures of the balls expose that a number of the white participants impersonated caricatures of Indigenous individuals. A few of them were effective political leaders, like Hayter Reed, who enacted policies to rob Indigenous individuals of their land and identity.

Jonathan Lainey, the manager for the Indigenous Cultures Collections at the McCord Stewart, states the colonial outfits sent out a message that “we can dress up as them due to the fact that they’re not there any longer.”

To the Peters, whatever Cooper collected is brand-new details. They didn’t understand about the Ewings, nor that they ‘d originate from Virginia or owned a servant.

Tim Peters called the discoveries stunning, however likewise favorable because they clarified a part of their origins the household had not troubled checking out. “I’ve no doubt that [Eileen Peters] would be thrilled that the gown survives on,” he stated.

To Cooper, revealing the lost stories of what she in the beginning idea was another ball dress for her exhibit ended up being a workout in “pressing back” versus the spaces in the archives.

We have not done a great task of gathering items that inform Black stories … and putting them forward,” the manager stated. “We can see the story of this gown as not just the story of the female who used it, however of a population that was ideal next to her the entire method, through the entire journey.”

Get a better take a look at the dress with McCord Stewart conservator Sonia Kata:

Producers

Nantali Indongo

Verity Stevenson

Graphics and animations artist

Steven Silcox

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Emiliano Bazan

Charles Contant

Video editor

Verity Stevenson

Text and design editor

Colin Harris