[URBAN NOTE] "The Tabor Hill Ossuary"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's David Wencer explained over the weekend the complex story of the Tabor Hill ossuary, found in the 1950s in the course of suburban construction in what is now north Toronto.

On August 17, 1956, while levelling land to make way for a new subdivision, a power shovel ripped into the side of Tabor Hill, northeast of the intersection of Lawrence Avenue and Bellamy Road. According to the next day’s Globe and Mail, “about 100 feet of earth were sliced from the hill before the shovel gouged out a pocket about four feet below the surface. The hole, about seven feet wide and one foot deep, was crammed with bones.” The shovel had uncovered a centuries-old burial pit, one of the earliest ossuary sites in Ontario.

It was immediately apparent that the site contained bones from many burials; initial reports suggested there were at least 50. Gus Harris, then the reeve of Scarborough Township, initially dismissed suggestions that the site might be a First Nations burial ground on the basis that no corresponding artifacts were present. One theory he suggested to the press was that the bones belonged to victims of a late 19th-century cholera epidemic. The Star printed a further theory of Harris’s: that the site at Tabor Hill “might be a disposal spot for some medical school, where they could put human remains after students were through with using them in the laboratories.”

“We should have charged admission,” one workman told reporters as Scarborough residents were crowding the site to see the unexpected discovery. Local children reportedly began digging in the surrounding area, finding additional bones buried only a few inches below the surface.

The next day, archaeological experts visited the site and identified it as a First Nations burial pit, likely several centuries old. James Lovekin, a graduate student and history teacher at R. H. King Collegiate Institute, told the Globe and Mail that he thought it was an Iroquois site from the 17th or 18th century, and suggested it was likely linked to a specific ceremony, wherein “bodies were allowed to decompose for seven years on platforms, scraped clean, and then buried during a Feast of the Dead ritual.”

Over the next few days, Walter A. Kenyon, an archaeologist and assistant curator of ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum, conducted a preliminary examination of Tabor Hill, in the process discovering a second burial pit at the site that was somewhat smaller than the first. Noting the large number of total burials at the site and the excellent condition of the bones, Kenyon wrote a letter to Gus Harris, suggesting action to preserve the ossuary and to have Tabor Hill declared a historic site. Harris took on this project with considerable enthusiasm, immediately announcing plans to form a committee with representatives from the provincial and federal governments, telling the Star, “We need financial help and we need it fast. Otherwise we could lose a national historical site.”