The community still exists today, peopled by descendants of those first fugitives, and was recognized as a National Historic Site by the government of Canada in 1999. William King, and it became the most successful planned settlement for the fugitives of slavery in Canada, with a population of more than 1,000 in the 1850s. The settlement was founded in 1849 by an abolitionist, the Rev. Setting it in Buxton allowed me to approach it from the periphery, through the eyes of Elijah Freeman, the first free child born in the settlement, who sees the community through his parents' eyes." While the characters in the novel are fictional, Buxton was and is a real place in Ontario, some 200 miles northeast of Detroit. Enter Elijah of Buxton.Ĭurtis explains, "I had always wanted to write a book about slavery but the conditions were so horrible I couldn't imagine writing from that point of view. "In my eyes it would take a very, very special book to displace The Watsons from the number one position on my list of favorites," he says. Perhaps because The Watsons changed his life and enabled him to write full-time, it has always been this author's favorite book. Now a sought-after and powerful speaker, Curtis recalls, "I had just been turned down for a promotion to become a customer service representative at the company because I was told, ”We don't think you're quite ready to speak to the public.'" Before The Watsons was published, Curtis spent 13 years on the assembly line at the Fisher Body Flint Plant No.
Curtis, who had long considered writing about slavery, realized that in Buxton he had discovered the setting for his new novel, Elijah of Buxton.Ĭurtis, who loves to do school visits and enjoys teasing the kids, burst onto the writing scene in 1995 with the Newbery Honor book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963, which he describes as one of those last-ditch efforts where you close your eyes and put everything you have into the ultimate do-or-die effort. The name of Buxton rang a bell it was the site of a 19th-century settlement for freemen and escaped slaves.
One day, award winning-author Christopher Paul Curtis, who makes his home in Windsor, Ontario, drove past a sign that read Buxton 5 kilometers.
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