When they died, they were buried without a marker. Inside the quest to restore dignity to some of Ontario’s forgotten
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When Cody Groat was a kid, he’d ride his bike around a seemingly empty swath of ground in the local cemetery. Townsfolk, too, out for a stroll, would promenade past the clearing, thinking it was to accommodate future burials.
But below the grass-covered field — about the size of a youth soccer pitch — there were bodies, hundreds upon hundreds, laid to rest without marker or memorial.
It would take Groat, now all grown up and an assistant professor at Western University, to uncover the richness of history buried there, of people whose stories would reveal how generations have treated their impoverished, their shunned, their forgotten.
Together with student researchers, Groat has worked to bring dignity back for 400 souls whose final resting place in the back of Ingersoll Rural Cemetery was noted in a burial registry as simply being, in “Potter’s Field.”
“The physical placement of it spoke to perceptions of the people who were buried here,” says Groat, “Out of sight; out of mind.”
But there are growing efforts across Canada and the United States to bring awareness of these common graves and of the people who lie within. There are few communities whose history does not include the presence of an indigent cemetery or pauper’s burial ground. Commonly known as potter’s fields — a biblical reference — these are the spots where cities and towns buried their unknown and unclaimed, as well as those who could not afford a plot.
“These people were important, too; it’s not just the wealthy and prominent that make history,” says Janie Cooper-Wilson, an Ontario Historical Society board member. “These people were the trailblazers; they were the ones that actually cut communities out of the bush.”
Some places, like Owen Sound, have chosen to erect memorials to mark these otherwise unadorned final resting places. Others are employing DNA testing on exhumed bodies to try and identify remains.
One of the largest potter’s fields in the world, Hart Island, northeast of the Bronx, NY., opened as a public park last November after more than 150 years of being largely inaccessible and shrouded in stigma. One million are buried there, including Civil War veterans, scores of AIDS patients and thousands who succumbed to COVID-19.
Toronto’s own potter’s field is more discreetly acknowledged. In 1826, the then-town of York purchased 2.5 hectares on the outskirts, at the northwest corner of Bloor Avenue and Yonge Street, for a public, non-denominational graveyard. Some 6,685 burials took place there until 1855 when the cemetery closed due to encroaching development. Bodies were relocated to Toronto Necropolis and Mount Pleasant Cemetery where inconspicuous plaques honour these early settlers.
The Toronto Historical Association has pressed for a more prominent commemoration at the original location, now an intersection with some of the city’s tallest towers. However, the Mount Pleasant Group told the Star there isn’t any current research or advocacy planned for the site.
In Ingersoll, a town of 13,600 almost two hours west of Toronto, there had been no prior academic research done on its potter’s field before Groat and his team began their investigation last year.
“We never actually had any idea there were that many people here, even though we could have gone through the registry and counted them,” says Debbie Johnston, chair of the Ingersoll Rural Cemetery Board. “But nobody did that. So, when the numbers started coming in, we were really taken aback.”
It was the registry itself that sparked Groat’s initial curiosity. Sitting at home during the pandemic and scrolling the internet, Groat landed on the Oxford County Library website where library technician Vicki Brenner had digitized and uploaded Ingersoll Rural Cemetery’s massive burial registry of 17,000 names.
Date and cause of death were noted, as well as location of plot, but Groat observed some entries were marked with the words “potter’s field.” It was a term not particularly familiar to the academic who teaches in Western’s department of history and Indigenous studies program. He was intrigued.
The origin of the term has been traced to the Gospel According to Matthew (27:3-10), wherein a remorseful Judas returns the silver pieces he was paid for betraying Jesus, and the high priests use the money to buy a burial ground for strangers, in a field where potters dug for clay. It’s a name that has stuck as a place where communities have interred their most marginalized.
“The focus of our project is to humanize the people buried there,” says Groat, who hired now-graduate Western students Rebecca Small and Emily Kirk to painstakingly go through the registry. “It went way beyond my expectations.”
The students found almost 400 people had been consigned to the field between 1864 and 1976. Searching old newspapers, census records and other documents, they built out life stories: narratives of the formerly enslaved, victims who drowned after a local dam burst, a boy born at sea but who died three days later, and Chinese men who paid a head tax to work in this country.
There was a high representation of Black people, including multigenerational families, which, says Groat, “speaks to the sustained economic marginalization of Black community members” in the town.
“There’s all of these narratives that don’t necessarily fit with the public interpretation of Ingersoll,” says Groat, “and that was really fascinating to me.”
He recalls the story of James Jarrett, a homeless man who died of exposure to weather under the stairs of a local business in 1883. His body had been dumped into a cart and then into a hole in potter’s field. For Groat, the appearance of homeless encampments only recently in his hometown and the community response, struck him as being "the same conversation 140 years later."
“We approach a lot of contemporary issues by considering that they are new problems that never existed before. But potter’s field is a condensed version of so many histories — of impoverishment, homelessness, disease epidemics, racism, economic marginalization. You can get people to think about their response to contemporary issues more effectively when you approach it through telling stories from the past.”
By the time research was completed this summer, only three people remained unidentified: an unhoused transient labourer who died in 1887, and two babies who died of infanticide in 1891 and 1912.
Ingersoll and the township of Zorra have contributed $25,000 toward the memorial.
A lack of government support can scupper efforts to honour potter’s fields, says OHS’s Cooper-Wilson. It’s a struggle because it can be costly for municipalities even to reset a small headstone, she says. “Let’s face it, if you’ve got your constituents screaming at you because there are potholes, are you going to spend money to restore an old cemetery?”
But “everyone is important,” she says. “Where’s their rest in peace?”
Groat was surprised by how the Ingersoll community rallied around the project. “That’s been really meaningful to me, just building this excitement and interest for preserving the memories of people who conventionally were not memorialized.”
Townsfolk often stopped by the site, saying hello to graduate student Isaac Bender who was regularly there testing non-invasive methods of identifying graves.
Bender was part of parallel research, in conjunction with a Canadian Archaeology Association working group, to develop best practices that could be used elsewhere to determine unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools, day schools and hospitals. Ingersoll, which last year passed a resolution to track its commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, endorsed this exploration on its potter’s field.
Bender employed eight different techniques, including drones, LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar, but it was hard, says Bender, to distinguish where each person was, having been buried so closely together.
The fact that they were “packed in so tightly,” says Groat, without the same comfort and space as those in regular plots, reflects “essentially what their worth was.”
Groat says the team is still determining where the biographies will be housed, but is hoping for a local museum or library where the public will be able to learn about the past to better inform their understanding of the present.
“That’s what’s going to be significant or memorable about this potter’s field project.”