Now the campus of Kings-Edgehill school, this campus is the original site of Kings College, now located in Halifax on the campus of Dalhousie University. In the late eighteenth century Windsor was a thriving loyalist enclave of well connected colonial social elites. This group helped found Kings College, the region’s first university. In the early stages of Loyalist settlement, the region was a vast region of interconnected hamlets focusing on natural resources. The main source of wealth at this time was in trade with the slave plantations in the British Caribbean. Many founding members of the university, and for that matter, the upper echilons of Nova Scotian soceity, generated their wealth through the toils of enslaved labour, and probably themselves kept enslaved Africans. The buildings of old the King’s College are a testament to the economic power of the slave economy. Despite being refugees of the losing royalist cause in the Thirteen Colonies, ample wealth was available to not only build necessary colonial infrastructure, but also the bastions of higher education.
See: https://ukings.ca/administration/public-documents/slavery-scholarly-inquiry/
Cover image: Weldon, Susanna Lucy Anne (Haliburton), and Owen Staples. King’s College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. Pencil, 123 x 152. Baldwin Collection of Canadiana. Toronto Public Library. Accessed June 7, 2023. https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/293813/kings-college-windsor-nova-scotia.
