Friday, April 21, 2017 5Brooklin Town Crier A Special BTC Feature Digging up the past in a Brooklin Pioneer Cemetery by Travis Fortnum It's like something from a Stephen King novel, an old pioneer cemetery abandoned and forgotten in the corner of suburbia. Where Church Street meets Albert Street, a kitty-corner from Brooklin Day Nursery, lies what used to be the Brooklin Methodist Episcopal (M.E.) Cemetery. "It's across the road from me," says Whitby mayor Don Mitchell, "I grew up in this house, but I don't remember thinking of it as a cemetery when I was young. It's got a long and unusual history." Established with the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1847, the same year the Village of Winchester was renamed Brooklin, the site served as the only burial place in Brooklin for nearly 40 years. It's not clear when the first body was buried in the cemetery, but in a 2011 historical report, retired Whitby archivist Brian Winter states it was likely around its establishment in 1847. There were no burials on the land after the Methodist Church amalgamated with Bible Christian (now the Brooklin Community Centre) and Wesleyan Methodist in 1884 to form what is now the Brooklin United Church. Headstones vandalized In 1888, complaints were filed stating that school children cutting across the land were vandalizing some of the remaining stones. The students passed through on their way to and from a public school that sat just south of the land, facing Winchester Road. The Brooklin Board of School Trustees voted in the summer of 1915 to take over the land and build a playground and athletic field on it. As spooky as it may sound, the board did in fact acquire the cemetery, but records don't reflect if it was converted into a playing field or not. Then the cemetery was officially closed in 1925. But a year later, a man named Dr. Thomas Erlin Kaiser travelled around southern Ontario collecting stones from abandoned cemeteries hoping to give them a new home. Kaiser was a medical doctor who set up practice in Oshawa, served as its mayor from 1907-08 and was a local history buff. Thanks to his efforts, some of the remaining stones at the Brooklin M.E. Cemetery found their way to Groveside in what is called the Pioneer Memorial section. Others were taken to be used as flag stones on private properties; some disappeared all together. In June of 1990, Brooklin Resident Diane Rooney said that when she moved into the home she had just purchased, she found stones from the cemetery on her lawn. Bodies still there And what about the bodies below the ground? "It's full of remains," Mitchell says. "That's the weirdness of the story." Mitchell says the land was owned by the township of Whitby and the government ordered the remaind be removed and relocated when Groveside opened. "Who knows what happened then," Mitchell says. "They probably just discovered how expensive it was and how many remains where there." Since then, the cemetery has been all but forgotten. Nobody has an official number of how many people are buried in the cemetery as the burial records have vanished. In the 90s, archeologists excavated sections of the land and dug up as many as 13 bodies. This included a coffin with a glass plate on top featuring a silver name plate, indicating it belonged to one Sarah Hartle, who died at 20 years-old in 1871. At the time, the archaeologists estimated that at least 100 bodies remain buried there. Why don't they just dig up the bodies and move them? The straight answer is: there is no straight answer. Cost, red tape and morality all factor into it a little bit. The Ontario Cemeteries Act stipulates how an abandoned cemetery is handled, stating that once an application process is completed (which in this case, it was) the land becomes municipal property. Vague rules The rules about digging up remains in a situation like this are less clear. Factor in the historic aspect of what lies beyond the tall black fence that fronts the street and it becomes harder to see a way for the bodies to be disinterred or archived in some fashion. To those who don't know the lot's history, the fence and sign labeling the land as municipal property seem relatively inconspicuous. Most par- ents whose children attend Brooklin Day Nursery don't even give it a second thought. When asked about the land, an employee said she didn't know anything about it. In 2012, Winter's report to Whitby's Planning and Development com- mittee suggested the land receive heritage designation, but there was never an official designation. Now, however, Sara Ferencz, archivist at the Whitby Public Library, has prepared a plaque and interpretive panel expected to be mounted sometime this year. But until this happens, the lot remains an impenetrable and eerie tangle of trees with a spooky and secret past.