Rose Fortune black businesswoman and Canada’s first female police officer
On my arrival at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, I visited Garrison Cemetery, among the oldest cemeteries in Canada and home to the oldest surviving English gravestone. It’s also the resting place of Rose Fortune, a Black businesswoman and Canada’s first self-appointed port constable, who kept order on the Annapolis Royal wharf for over two decades.
It all started around the 1820s, when Rose — a Black Loyalist whose parents had gained their freedom by pledging loyalty to the British during the American Revolutionary War, started a one-person cartage business, using a wheelbarrow to transport luggage from the Annapolis Royal ferry docks to hotels and homes. She became a fixture at the docks, greeting incoming passengers as they came ashore from places like Digby, Saint John, New Brunswick, and other Bay of Fundy ports.
Accounts describe her as a striking, authoritative figure while working. She wore a man’s coat and felt hat and carried a small stick, which she reportedly used to move people out of her way. This authoritative woman was perfectly positioned to appoint herself the role of port constable — later remembered as Canada’s first female police officer.
Several accounts describe her keeping local young people “in line,” suggesting she policed after-hours behaviour or loitering around the waterfront. Rose wasn’t just a passive presence; she physically directed people and didn’t hesitate to swat those who got in her way with her cane.
The twice-married businesswoman personally witnessed the transition from sail to steam-powered transportation on the very docks where she worked, and lived long enough to be recorded, at nearly 80, as “a privileged character.”
Her descendants, including her great-great-great-granddaughter, have spoken about family continuity in the cartage and trucking trade, suggesting the Fortune family carried some version of that work forward in Annapolis Royal for generations afterward.
Rose Fortune died in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, on February 20, 1864, at about age 89.
Her death record, from St. Luke’s Anglican parish registers, confirms the burial took place there that month — though her exact plot within the cemetery grounds remains unmarked and unknown.
1774–1864
See my similar visit to the grave of Canada’s first Black mailman, Albert Jackson.
