Yorkville, Toronto
Underground History
As I turned the corner at Yonge
and Bloor, on my evening walk amid corporate giant edifices, I was drawn to the
actual writing on the wall of one of them. Below street level, where now exists
a bustling commuter train called the subway, was an underground
non-denominational cemetery called Potter’s Field. It’s hard to believe that
just less than 200 years ago was a sprawling 2.4 hectares of this burial ground
where 6, 700 people were buried at what was then the edge of “The Woods.”
It’s a good guess that under the
office towers there are a few bones of the early settlers still resting. In
1855, the city moved what they could of the buried corpses to a now
well-established Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a bit north. That was only thirty
years after the Potter’s Field began.
This is a piece of Toronto’s
history. It’s only 200 years old; a British settlement which was merely a fort
until America burned it down in 1812. Since then it grew, and is still growing
into a mega-city.
I was always fascinated by
history.
Just one kilometre north of this
location is what’s known as The Ancient Trail, trodden upon by Indigenous
people, the Hurons. Along that trail is the place of our current temple and
ashram; once a Methodist Church.
History tells of people
replacements and, just as thousands of settlers or wanderers of the very spot
where they once stood came and went, bodies will also be recycled while our
souls will move on, perhaps to other planets.
May the Source be with you!
3 km
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