Samuel Hume Blake (1835–1914) National Historic Person
© Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario
Samuel Hume Blake was designated as a national historic person in 2025.
Historical importance: influential lawyer, judge, orator, author, evangelical activist, and Anglican lay leader who advocated social reform for the closure of residential schools for Indigenous children.
Commemorative plaque: no plaque installedFootnote 1
Samuel Hume Blake (1835–1914)
Samuel Hume Blake was an influential lawyer, judge, orator, author, Anglican lay leader, and evangelical activist who advocated for social reform through his publications and the institutions he helped establish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the founder and chair of a special committee investigating residential schools for Indigenous children, he led a near-successful campaign to close church-administered schools, exposing the financial issues and corruption in the system, the appalling conditions and high mortality rates in the schools, and the harmful impacts on the children and their families. Still believing in assimilation through evangelical teaching, he proposed government-run day schools instead.
Born in 1835 in Toronto, Ontario, Blake studied law at the University of Toronto, graduated in 1858, and opened a law firm with his brother Edward. He held several important legal positions in the 1870s, such as provincial Queen’s Counsel and senior vice-chancellor (judge) of the Ontario Court of Chancery. This prominent lawyer was also deeply involved in evangelical Anglicanism. In 1869, he co-founded the Evangelical Association (later called the Church Association) to lobby against Roman Catholic influence in the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. He helped establish and led various educational institutions, such as Wycliffe College in Toronto (1877), Canada’s evangelical Anglican seat of higher learning in theology. Blake supported the University of Toronto as its legal counsel, a lecturer on law ethics, a trustee, and a life-long benefactor.
Meanwhile, Blake published some 50 works championing social reform and denouncing religious and political corruption. He also led various organizations focused on improving the welfare of disadvantaged people in Toronto. However, these organizations included industrial schools which have since been widely condemned. By the 1880s, the press knew him as “the Honourable Psalm Blake,” but his outspoken social and religious views made him controversial. He resigned from the bench in 1881 to focus on his law practice and to increase his social reform activities. Still, he was appointed a Dominion Queen’s Counsel in 1885.
As a leader of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, Blake formed and led a multi-denominational committee to investigate residential (boarding) schools for Indigenous children from 1904 to 1910. From the earliest days of the schools, students, their families, and Indigenous leaders had voiced objections, and protested everything from attendance to poor conditions, mistreatment, and the inadequate quality of schooling. The committee and Blake’s publications, such as Don’t You Hear the Red Man Calling? (1908), highlighted to government officials, church leaders, and the public the financial and corruption issues within the system, the appalling conditions that caused high mortality rates in the schools, and the harmful impacts of the schools on the children and their families. Still believing in assimilating Indigenous children through evangelical teaching, a common view at that time, Blake’s solution was to close these boarding schools and replace them with day schools financed and administered by the federal government. However, influential Anglican school administrators ultimately managed to retain control of their residential schools.
Blake’s efforts to end the residential school system for Indigenous children were controversial and unsuccessful. Still, his work contributed to bringing to light the significant issues within the system and the devastating impacts on Indigenous children, their families, and communities.
This press backgrounder was prepared at the time of the Ministerial announcement in 2025.
The National Program of Historical Commemoration relies on the participation of Canadians in the identification of places, events and persons of national historic significance. Any member of the public can nominate a topic for consideration by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.
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