Necropolis, Toronto

Toronto Necropolis Cemetery is a non-denominational cemetery established in 1850 and located on the west side of the Don Valley, adjacent to Cabbagetown. It was created by the Toronto General Burying Grounds Trust in response to overcrowding at earlier burial grounds in the city, including St. James’ Churchyard. The cemetery was designed in the mid-nineteenth-century garden cemetery tradition, which emphasized landscaped grounds, winding paths, and a park-like setting outside the dense urban core.

The site occupies approximately 18 acres and includes traditional in-ground burials, family plots, columbaria, and cremation sections added in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A chapel was constructed on the grounds in 1872 and remains in use. The cemetery also contains a designated Potter’s Field (public graves area), where individuals without family resources were buried at municipal expense.

Necropolis Cemetery reflects Toronto’s social and political history. Interments include reform politicians, physicians, journalists, labour leaders, military veterans, and members of Toronto’s early Black community. Notable burials include William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion and the city’s first mayor; George Brown, Father of Confederation and founder of The Globe newspaper; and Anderson Ruffin Abbott, the first Canadian-born Black physician.

The cemetery remains active and is administered by the Toronto General Burying Grounds Trust. Its historical landscape, monuments, and burial records provide significant documentation of nineteenth-century Toronto and the development of the city’s civic institutions.

The Necropolis covers about 18.25 acres (approximately 7.4 hectares) of land on the west slope of the Don River valley in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto. This measurement appears on heritage descriptions and in cemetery documentation that note the cemetery’s extent since its establishment in 1850 to replace downtown burial grounds.