“He does not beat all nature, but his lather is clean and unrivaled. His razors like true wit cut deep both up and down and shave clean.”
This 19th century sales pitch is from Kitchener’s first barber Peter Edward Susand, who plied his trade on Ontario St (then called Foundry St) near to the Red Lion Inn. Born in 1802, Susand escaped slavery in the American south to first settle in the Queen’s Bush community before moving to Berlin where he made significant contributions to its economic and civic life. By 1943, he and his wife Elizabeth Liddicoat, a white woman from England, were farming on a 50-acre plot of land and Susand had gained a reputation in Queen’s Bush as a polished orator and advocate for education. In 1847, he was named president of a committee dedicated to the welfare of the community and the education of Black children. In his speech, printed in the abolitionist paper The True Wesleyan, Susand proclaimed:
“In the early part of our lives we have been oppressed and denied the rights common to man universally..... [God] sent Moses to deliver his people anciently, and he has also provided for our deliverance. And after we had reached the promised land, Moses is still with us in the form of teachers, who are instructing our children and preparing them for the duties of life.... Let us cherish the means of education”
A decade later, the Susand family included 10 children and they had relocated to Berlin where Susand started a number of business ventures. In addition to being the city’s first barber, Susand also established a coffee house called Meridian Coffee Salon and an advertisement in a local paper shows that by 1856 he was branching out into grocery sales.
Outside of his contributions to the commercial landscape of Berlin, Susand was also known as a lover of poetry and literature. His fondness for Shakespeare can be seen in some of his children’s names, Lavinia and Othello. In 1856 he published a book of his own work The Prose and Poetical Works of Peter Edward Susand of which there is unfortunately no surviving copy, but his love of wordplay can be seen even in his business advertisements (such as the one mentioned earlier about ‘true wit’ cutting deep).
For more information about Peter Susand and Black history in the Waterloo Region, check out the following resources:
Waterloo You Never Knew: Life on the Margins - Joanna Rickert -Hall
The Queen's Bush Settlement - Linda Brown-Kubisch
Stroll Walking Tours - Black History Learning Resources
Canlit.ca - Peter Susand Lost Texts and Black Canadian Literary Culture of the 1850s
Bridget, Senior Library Assistant
Grace Schmidt Room of Local History