Old St. Andrews

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Norris House

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Item

This house was a gift of the Townspeople to Cadman Norris sometime before his death in 1948, aged 58. Mr. Norris held the distinction of being the black person in St. Andrews. He descended from the Stewart family on his mother's side. Although not a lot is known about the Stewarts, they seem to have been resident in St. Andrews from the early part of the 19th century, perhaps as part of a much larger contingent of blacks who came, both as servants, soldiers and perhaps also as slaves, with the Loyalists in 1783. In the middle part of the 19th century Cedar Lane was known as Slabtown, and was a shanty town housing most of the Town's black population and a number of poor Irish. Cadman Norris maternal grandfather, Moses Stewart lived there. In his death notice in 1888 he was noted to be the last full-blooded black man in St. Andrews. The item included here about the death of his son George gives some sense of life in Slabtown.

One of his daughters, Maria, in 1879 married Charles Norris of Maryland. Mr. Norris was said to have been a freed Maryland slave who served with the British in the Revolution. There were several children, some of whom died young. By 1940 or so only two were left - Caddy Norris and his oldest sister Helen, who was blind. Caddy was much loved by the people of St. Andrews. He was a kind-hearted person who didn't have much and who worked hard all his life. His funeral was one of the largest in the Town. A tribute to him by Frederick Worrell, included here, is a just assessment of his life as a black man in a white town.