Canada, Virginia: The Free Black Neighborhood Beside Jefferson's University

01Where Was Canada, Virginia?

Canada lay south of the university's Academical Village, in what is now the area around Jefferson Park Avenue and Venable Lane. Historically the land was in Albemarle County. Encyclopedia Virginia places Kitty Foster, its best-documented resident, as a tenant "in Albemarle County, just south of the University of Virginia." Today the site falls inside the independent city of Charlottesville, and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources lists the Foster Site, part of Canada, under that jurisdiction.

By the 1890s the road that separated the community from the university had been paved and renamed Jefferson Park Avenue. The Foster Site is bounded on the north by that avenue and on the west by the former Venable Lane alley. These are ordinary streets in a busy university district now. A visitor looking for an abandoned Canada will find a campus.

02Kitty Foster and the Making of a Neighborhood

Free people of color began moving into the area in the 1830s, according to UVA's own history of race and property. By the 1860s the place was increasingly called "Canada." The precise founding year is not documented in the sources, and no population count survived in the material reviewed. This was a small, informal community, not a platted town.

The best-known name attached to it is Kitty Foster. Encyclopedia Virginia records that she was free by 1820 and renting land in the community. In 1833 she bought a little more than two acres from a white merchant. A UVA account says she "became the first free Black woman to own property in this area," though that claim of being first rests on a single source. She worked as a laundress and seamstress and died in 1863.

Her work was typical of the neighborhood. Residents were laundresses, seamstresses, carpenters, and cobblers, according to C-VILLE Weekly, and most served the students and faculty next door. The university was both the community's economy and its neighbor, and the relationship was not always easy. An 1837 university report accused Foster of holding firearms for students who were barred from keeping them on grounds.

03Why Was It Called Canada?

Researchers have theorized that the name honored the country to the north, where slavery had been abolished. One researcher quoted in The Cavalier Daily in 2009 thought the name was "likely symbolic" of Canada as the final destination of people escaping slavery.

A different reading comes from UVA historian von Daacke, quoted by journalist Kasey Roper. He described the name as "a kind of a derisive reference" used by faculty and students toward free Black people they thought should be enslaved. A UVA walking-tour page, by contrast, says the inhabitants themselves used the name. Whether it began as an insult or as a statement of hope, or became both, is not settled in the record.

04What Happened to Canada?

Canada did not burn, flood, or run out of ore. It was squeezed out. The university's Board of Visitors repeatedly objected to the neighborhood. In 1896 they decided to build Old Cabell Hall to "close off the Academical Village" from it. ProPublica, citing a 2021 UVA publication, reports that the university disliked the "unsightly houses" there. White developers bought land in the 1890s and built large homes.

After Foster's death in 1863, her land was subdivided among her descendants. It stayed in the family until about 1906, when it was sold to white developers, a sale the Department of Historic Resources independently supports. The community did not outlast that early twentieth-century land purchase, though no exact year of abandonment is documented.

A neighboring community, Gospel Hill, met a later version of the same fate. UVA bought properties there in the 1970s and 1980s and razed them.

05What Remains of Canada Today

Nothing of the neighborhood survives above ground. What remains is archaeological. In 1993, construction of a parking lot uncovered a small cemetery. Surveys in 2002 and 2005 brought the count to 32 graves, a figure repeated in the National Register nomination. The Foster Site also holds a domestic basement, a brick firebox and chimney base, masonry piers, a brick-lined well, and a likely smokehouse.

UVA dedicated a memorial in 2011. It includes a "shadow catcher," a steel outline of Foster's house. The memorial park covers 0.74 acres on the university's South Lawn, near Nau Hall. The site was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register on March 17, 2016, and on the National Register of Historic Places on May 16, 2016.

The memorial is easy to reach, but it tells only part of the story. A University of Pennsylvania preservation analysis notes that the site's single sign gives no description of the Canada community itself. The Rivanna Archaeological Services report on the Foster Family–Venable Lane Site covers Canada's development and decline in detail, and it is the place to look for more.