THE SHILOH PEOPLE

Twenty-nine km northeast of Maidstone, in Saskatchewan, Canada, stands a small log building that was once the center of an African American pioneer community.
Today, a graveyard known as the Shiloh Baptist Cemetery and the nearby log building called Shiloh Baptist Church are all that remain of this community. Those who settled there are now remembered as the Shiloh People. 
Shortly after Oklahoma and the Indian Territory merged to become a State in 1907, the new government began passing discriminatory legislation against African Americans. Segregation and laws disenfranchising African American’s, encouraged them to take serious note of advertisements for free homesteads in Western Canada. 
Many of the people who left Oklahoma settled in Alberta. However, a small group of 10 or 12 families, led by Julius Caesar Lane and Joseph Mayes would found the Shiloh colony in the rural municipality of Eldon. It is estimated that between 50 and 75 African American families lived in Eldon and the surrounding districts at the height of the colony’s existence in the late 1920s. 
Although the descendents of the Shiloh people have dispersed across Western Canada, Shiloh Baptist Church still stands today, a visible reminder of the Black pioneer’s faith and desire to build a better life. 
Today, descendants of the Shiloh people revere Shiloh Church as a symbol of our ancestor’s pioneer experience in Saskatchewan.

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