[Footnote 2:  Drew said:  “The prejudice against the African race is here [Canada] strongly marked.  It had not been customary to levy school taxes on the colored people.  Some three or four years since a trustee assessed a school tax on some of the wealthy citizens of that class.  They sent their children at once into the public school.  As these sat down the white children near them deserted the benches:  and in a day or two the white children were wholly withdrawn, leaving the schoolhouse to the teacher and his colored pupils.  The matter was at last ‘compromised’:  a notice ‘Select School’ was put on the schoolhouse:  the white children were selected in and the black were selected out.”  See Drew’s. A North-side View of Slavery, etc., p. 341.]

[Footnote 3:  Mitchell, The Underground Railroad, pp. 140, 164, and 165.]

[Footnote 4:  Drew, A North-side View of Slavery, pp. 118, 147, 235, and 342.]

[Footnote 5:  Ibid., p. 341.]

[Footnote 6:  Siebert, The Underground Railroad, p. 229.]

[Footnote 7:  Ibid., p. 229.]

[Footnote 8:  First Annual Report of the Anti-slavery Society of Canada, 1852, Appendix, p. 22.]

[Footnote 9:  Ibid., p. 15.]

The most helpful schools, however, were not those maintained by the state.  Travelers in Canada found the colored mission schools with a larger attendance and doing better work than those maintained at public expense.[1] The rise of the mission schools was due to the effort to “furnish the conditions under which whatever appreciation of education there was native in a community of Negroes, or whatever taste for it could be awakened there,” might be “free to assert itself unhindered by real or imagined opposition."[2] There were no such schools in 1830, but by 1838 philanthropists had established the first mission among the Canadian refugees.[3] The English Colonial Church and School Society organized schools at London, Amherstburg, and Colchester.  Certain religious organizations of the United States sent ten or more teachers to these settlements.[4] In 1839 these workers were conducting four schools while Rev. Hiram Wilson, their inspector, probably had several other institutions under his supervision.[5] In 1844 Levi Coffin found a large school at Isaac Rice’s mission at Fort Maiden or Amherstburg.[6] Rice had toiled among these people six years, receiving very little financial aid, and suffering unusual hardships.[7] Mr. E. Child, a graduate of Oneida Institute, was later added to the corps of mission teachers.[8] In 1852 Mrs. Laura S. Haviland was secured to teach the school of the colony of “Refugees’ Home,” where the colored people had built a structure “for school and meeting purposes."[9] On Sundays the schoolhouses and churches were crowded by eager seekers, many of whom lived miles away.  Among these earnest students a traveler saw an aged couple more than eighty years old.[10] These elementary schools broke the way for a higher institution at Dawn, known as the Manual Labor Institute.