Ottawa’s first cemetery unearthed during downtown water-main repair,
Water-main repair under Queen Street was halted when bones were found. Archeologists have since carefully dug up Ottawa’s first burial ground, writes DAVID REEVELY.
They died of falls, of drownings, of malaria or cholera. They were of all ages, at least one of them a toddler. They were, like most all of Ottawa’s earliest people, Christians. And they had one other thing in common: They were forgotten.
They died in Ottawa’s earliest days and were buried under what became a modern city’s downtown core. Then they were left behind when their downtown cemetery was moved east to Lowertown in the 1840s. For 170 years, we have been walking, driving, biking, even running streetcars over them where they lay in their graves under Queen Street.
Ben Mortimer and his team of archeologists spent the autumn gradually uncovering human remains during an excavation of a lane of Queen between Metcalfe and Elgin streets since Sept. 27, about a week after a crew replacing a water main came upon what they quickly realized were bones in their construction pit.
Those turned out to be the jumbled remains of two people. As the archeologists worked their way east, they found what they believe to be the remains of 16 people in all. The dig found the disintegrated remains of coffins diagonal to the street, about four feet underground, mostly surrounded by sand.
“They’re all aligned east-west, perfectly east-west,” Mortimer said on a cold day last month, standing in the pit his team carefully opened (the Citizen agreed to wait until the dig was complete before publishing this story). “It’s a pretty standard Christian alignment.”
On either side of the pit, Queen Street’s asphalt had been cut away cleanly. Toward Elgin Street, a backhoe pulled away the surface layers of soil underneath under an archeologist’s supervision. “We only let them scrape maybe an inch at a time at most,” Mortimer said.
Farther west, where the heavy digging had already been done, archeologist Kylie Best scooped at a layer of sand with a trowel. The yellowish grit had a brown streak in it. “It may be a coffin and we’ll find wood fragments,” she said. “It may be nothing.”
A few feet away and up on the intact asphalt of the road, another member of the team sifted shovelsful of soil through a woodframed screen. That work mostly turned up litter, some of which has become more interesting with time — buttons, fragments of ceramic, other things tossed idly on the ground many decades ago that just never broke down.
“It’s the stereotypical archeology you see on TV,” Mortimer joked. But with much more of an audience than any dig in Sudan, or even the suburban development sites that the firm Mortimer works for, Paterson Group, more typically examines. Hundreds of people passed on the sidewalk to the south, dozens could look right in from their office windows, past the black cloth that lined the street-level fences.
“We’re trying to minimize the passerby peek-in effect,” Mortimer said. “It’s difficult. When we leave the site, we try to make sure everything is covered up and locked down, even if it’s just for a coffee break. We need to be respectful. These are people.”
The best preserved remains were at the west end of the dig, under a tent like a winter car shelter. Two layers of tarpaulins covered upturned plastic storage boxes. Mortimer cleared away the coverings, removed a few rocks, and gently lifted away a layer of black cloth. Underneath, a skeleton.
“This is a young female,” he said. They found an ornamental hairpin and a stick pin that was likely at her collar when she was buried. The bones of her arms were tucked delicately against her rib cage. Her fallen jaw was at an unsettling angle from the rest of her skull, her upper and lower teeth splayed in opposite directions. That happens as a body decomposes and a coffin eventually collapses and the earth comes in.
No photographs. Mortimer covered the bones again.
On the other side of the tent, he cleared away the covering to reveal a more heart-tugging scene: Four bones, each about the size of a Magic Marker, in two lines. Two femurs, two tibias: a toddler’s legs.
“You can see ... the empty grave shaft,” Mortimer said, pointing to a change in the colour of the earth just next to the child’s bones. “So that one was moved out. This one was not.”
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The cemetery at Queen and Metcalfe wasn’t a surprise. It’s in numerous historical records as Ottawa’s first; before Lt.-Col. John By established it in about 1828, people who died here — workers digging the Rideau Canal and their relatives — were ferried across the Ottawa River to be buried.
The best-known theory is that a malaria outbreak made those burials impractical, so the canal crews started burying their dead here; Mortimer says there’s evidence that a particular canal worker, a Mr. Burrows, earlier petitioned Col. By to bury his late son on the south side of the river and the new cemetery became the burial ground of choice, especially when the malaria epidemic was followed by even deadlier cholera in the 1830s.
By the 1840s, as Bytown grew, the cemetery grew. An edition of the Bytown Gazette of 1843 records a letter from a reader complaining of a “floating vapour” at the site, which investigation revealed came from “the corrupting body of a fellow mortal, and over whom another was placed, and which last was only covered by two feet of loose sand.”
Beginning in 1845, the cemetery was moved to Lowertown, to what’s now Macdonald Gardens park off Cobourg Street. Later on, even that cemetery moved farther east to Beechwood and Notre Dame. Today, if we moved a cemetery because it had become a public-health threat, we would move everyone in it. In 1845, though, they moved the remains only of those people who had someone willing to pay.
How does Mortimer imagine a small child’s bones were left behind when that happened? He hesitated and looked into the distance. “I have kids, they’re four and six,” he says. “I ask myself that all the time.”
The truth, though we’ll never know it, is likely simple. Maybe the parents died in a later epidemic and none of the child’s kin were left. Maybe they had moved away. Or maybe they just could not afford it. By definition, Mortimer said, “These were some of Bytown’s most unprivileged people.”
■ An obvious question that may never get an answer is how nobody in living memory noted the bones before now. The archeological excavation only happened because crews were trying to get at a water main that’s underneath the level of the remains. It must have been installed without disturbing these dead still in their graves, but Mortimer’s dig site is criss-crossed with conduits for modern-era cables and pipes. An underground brick face along part of the trench where Queen met the sidewalk is thought to have been part of Ottawa’s old streetcar network.
Somebody must have encountered bones here before, right?
“I wasn’t here. I wouldn’t dare to speculate on what people before us might have done or not done,” Mortimer said. “A lot of work like this was done at night, so maybe the light was poor and they didn’t see.”
The dig was closely constrained to just the space on Queen needed for the new water main. If the archeologists found a coffin or other artifact, they could follow it as far as it went out of their defined rectangle but not beyond.
Work on the north side of Queen, opposite the dig, gave the team a chance to see what’s underground there. It’s all “imported fill,” Mortimer says, sand and soil brought in from somewhere else to fill in a hole for some earlier construction. If the burial ground extended to the north, anything that was there is gone.
■ For now, the remains in the trench have been insulated and reburied, along with evidence of as many as 21 more graves the archeologists found empty.
The city is the authority responsible for the remains his team has found. It will at some point put out a call for “representatives” to claim them: family members, if anyone can prove a connection, though Mortimer doubts anyone will be able to. A scouring of public and church archives, doing their best to narrow the possible identities, led the team to the belief that the Queen Street graves were from the Methodist section of the burial ground, distinct from the areas for Catholics, Presbyterians and Anglicans.
Most likely they’ll be spoken for by modern community groups and churches, and Mortimer imagines they’ll be moved together to Beechwood Cemetery and reburied close to their original neighbours.