This archive photo shows the cemetery of St. John’s Norway Anglican Church (Woodbine Avenue and Kingston Road). The original congregation (pictured in the background of the photo) was founded in 1853.
By GENE DOMAGALA
I will be leading a historical walking tour of St. John’s Norway Cemetery on Saturday, August 31st.
The walk begins at 1:00 p.m. and we meet at the northwest corner of Kingston Road and Woodbine Avenue.
I have been doing this walk for over 40 years and I always see and hear something new about St. John’s Cemetery.
As I walked through it recently, I thought to myself: This is history and this is what history is about.
You may be wondering what I mean by that? Well, what I mean is this: St. John’s Cemetery embodies what a historical place is for a particular geographic and political area.
St. John’s Norway Cemetery and St. John the Baptist Norway Anglican Church were originally called St. John’s Berkely. Yes, they were called St. John’s Berkely.
The original land on which the church and cemetery are located belonged to a pioneer named J. Small, a large landowner who worked for the colonial government a few hundred years ago. Mr. Small donated about three and a half acres to the Anglican Diocese for a church and cemetery around 1853.
The name of his country and residence was Berkely, hence the name St. John’s Berkely.
In later years, there was a small hamlet called Norway in the area around Kingston and Woodbine. People began calling the church and cemetery St. John’s Norway, and it has remained so to this day.
When I write that St. John’s is a historic place, it is because it is. There are dozens and dozens of reasons I can cite and write about regarding the history of the cemetery.
The church’s original site, a schoolhouse on Kingston Road brought here by settlers, is steeped in history. The cemetery contains hundreds of graves commemorating soldiers from many wars.
In total, about 80,000 people are buried there. Some of them are the pioneers who built up the area around the beach and East Toronto. Among those buried in St. John’s are politicians, ministers and civil servants, but above all the ordinary people who have lived and worked in this area over the last 170 years.
History is when a family or an ordinary person walks through the gates of the cemetery and visits the grave of a relative or friend. They remember the fallen, the sick, the good times and the bad. That’s what history is about.
There are many gravesites and monuments, some of them related to terrible tragedies, and that is history. Also to be remembered is the impact of Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and the effect it had on St. John’s Cemetery.
When I recall my previous walks in St. John’s Cemetery, I always remember how some of the people there would tell me about their friends and relatives buried there. They would always look at the soldiers’ grave and talk in a solemn mood.
That’s what the story is about, I thought. On the walk we will see the graves and monuments and notice St. John’s Church and the cemetery office buildings.
But then I thought that it is not the graves and not the buildings – it is the people and the memories they convey that make up the real history and are a tribute to those buried and resting in St. John’s Cemetery.
