July 2025
Victoria Square Park, in downtown Toronto, is a small park with a morbid past. Like McBurney Park in Kingston, Ontario, a park known locally as Skeleton Park, was the final resting place for many early settlers in the Toronto area of Upper Canada.
The cemetery was established in 1793, under orders from Governor John Graves Simcoe, as the burial place for those affiliated with the nearby Toronto Garrison, stationed at Fort York, the first cemetery to be used by European settlers in what would become the city of Toronto. The first burial in the cemetery was Simcoe’s infant daughter Katherine, who died in 1794. It remained the military cemetery for Toronto until 1863, when it reached capacity at around 400 interments.
The former cemetery was turned into a park in the later 1800s, originally known as St. John’s Square.
Decades of vandalism and neglect resulted in all the gravestones being removed and scattered about the property, with only 17 remaining today. These gravestones, some barely readable, were gathered up and mounted on a concrete base along the eastern edge of the park. Where possible, a small plate is placed beneath each gravestone with the text of the barely readable stones, thereby preserving the fading inscriptions.
The centrepiece of the park is a monument to the casualties of the War of 1812, dedicated in 1902.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Memorial_Square.
