~ Forgotten Fences, Weathered Names: A Journey through Ontario’s Earliest Burials!” ~

Leith Church Cemetery (St. James’/Historic Leith Church), a few minutes northeast of Owen Sound, is where the family grave marker for painter Tom Thomson stands, the name cut deep into granite under a Scotch pine. Official burial records say his body was re-interred here in July 1917, days after a hasty first burial at Canoe Lake; the provincial cemetery regulator even published a scan of the 1917 Leith burial record. Yet the old argument never dies, that he never truly left Algonquin. Leith wears both truths at once: a documented reburial and a persistent whisper that the North kept him.

Leith Church Cemetery (Tom Thomson)

Follow the whisper into Algonquin and you reach Mowat Cemetery, the tiny burial ground on a knoll above Canoe Lake. Thomson lay here briefly in July 1917 before his family reclaimed him. Near the plot stands the grave of James A. Watson, a young Gilmour Lumber Company employee whose headstone was engraved “gratis by a comrade,” and not far away, at Hayhurst Point, friends erected a cairn that same autumn so that Thomson’s memory would stay where he painted. The place is small, just a few markers, moss, birch, and lake light, but it spills into legend.

Mowat Cemetery

Priceville holds two pioneer stories side by side. The Priceville Pioneer Cemetery, its weathered Gaelic names a reminder of the village’s Scottish roots, sits just off Grey Road 4, still listed and maintained by the municipality. And east of town, the Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Cemetery keeps vigil for some of the first Black settlers in Grey County, a community that built a school, church, and burying ground on Durham Road in the mid-1800s. Their headstones were taken up and, famously, scandalously, found decades later under a roadbed and sidewalks; the community fought for their return and a cairn now marks the site. Even the municipal page, the cemetery society, and heritage listings present it as a place of repair as much as remembrance.

Priceville Pioneer Cemetery

Southwest, in Brant County, Oakland Pioneer Cemetery looks like a stage set for pioneer memory because, in a way, it is. Long inactive, its stones were gathered into two elegant semicircles and anchored in concrete, with a tall cairn by the old entrance—“In memory of THE PIONEERS, Oakland Township…1811–1941.” Local history points to very early burials, and the county notes it as one of their heritage places. It’s curated, yes, but respectfully so, an attempt to preserve what wind, frost, and cattle once scattered.

Oakland Pioneer Cemetery

Kingsville’s Augustine Pioneer Cemetery began as a modest family-and-neighbours plot and, like so many farm graveyards, essentially vanished into grass until local heritage volunteers pushed for recognition. By the late 1990s it had become a case study in saving pioneer cemeteries; today a tall granite monument stands where the little burying ground once lay forgotten, just off Main Street life and the hum of the Leamington-Kingsville shore.

Augustine Pioneer Cemetery

Newmarket’s Pioneer Burying Ground, also called the Eagle Street Cemetery, tells a different kind of preservation story. After the newer town cemetery opened in 1869, this older, non-denominational ground fell into disrepair. In 1947 workers gathered the broken stones into two large concrete cairns and raised a Celtic cross, a stark memorial in the center of town to at least 120 of Newmarket’s earliest settlers. It’s now a protected historic site, a triangle of grass and granite that reads like a roll call of founders.

Newmarket’s Pioneer Burying Ground (Eagle Street Cemetery)

Some pioneer grounds survive mostly as notations in archives and map coordinates, but they still anchor their townships to first settlement. Corrie’s Corners Pioneer Cemetery in Ashfield Township, Huron County, appears in the province’s lists of unregistered cemeteries and in township inventories; it’s the sort of tiny corner plot, on a concession, at a crossroads, that reminds you how often early burials happened near where people farmed, worshipped, and waited out winters. The same is true of Peter McDougall Pioneer Cemetery in Grey Township, pinpointed down to concession and lot in archival film. You may step out of a car onto gravel, feel the ditch grass against your knees, and realize the whole place consists of a few lichen-blurred tablets and a fence post, but the records keep it real.

Peter McDougall Pioneer Cemetery in Grey Township

North of Orillia, Kett’s Burying Ground at Sadowa fits that “family plot that became a community memory” pattern. It’s a small pioneer cemetery, documented by genealogical societies and early microfilm projects, tucked into the landscape the way settlers tucked their dead into the corners of cleared farm lots. You won’t find a visitor centre; you’ll find names that show up again on township maps, school registers, and homestead deeds.

Kett’s Burying Ground, Sadowa

Eugenia, famous for its waterfall and for one of Ontario’s cheekiest episodes of gold fever, has an “Abandoned Cemetery” on the municipal rolls. In the 1850s a rush lit up the rocks below Eugenia Falls before fizzling into iron pyrite and rueful laughter; the village still marks the tale. That same sense of boom-and-after echoes in the little cemetery listing: an officially “abandoned” site, noted by county and museums, a reminder that communities move, churches close, and burying grounds can slip from memory unless someone writes them down and mows them once a year.

Eugenia Abandoned Cemetery

Bannockburn Pioneer Cemetery sits in the long shadow of Hastings County’s gold stories. The mining record places the Bannockburn gold site just west of the hamlet on the Moira River; provincial plaques roll its name alongside Deloro and Eldorado when they tell of early Ontario gold. The cemetery is a quieter ledger of that fever: families who came on whispers of ore and stayed to farm, their names etched into limestone even after the rocker boxes and stamps went still.

Bannockburn Pioneer Cemetery

St. John’s Anglican Cemetery, Port Hope — The Great Farini’s last bow
Walk a few minutes south of Union Cemetery and you reach St. John’s Anglican Cemetery, where the daredevil William Leonard Hunt, better known as The Great Farini, was laid to rest in January 1929. Local histories note his burial here at age 91; St. John’s records and municipal updates place the cemetery within Port Hope’s historic burial grounds. Farini’s grave is a modest, flat stone with a small plaque, surprisingly quiet for the man who high-wired the Ganaraska River in 1859 and helped make Niagara Gorge tightrope feats an international sensation a year later. It’s the kind of pioneer-era contrast these old cemeteries specialize in: a thunderous life, a whisper of a marker.

St. John’s Anglican Cemetery, Port Hope (William Leonard Hunt – The Great Farini)

Pengelly Family Cemetery, near Bewdley — Where a hymn began
North of Port Hope, the tiny Pengelly (often spelled Pengelley) family burying ground holds Joseph Medlicott Scriven, the Irish-born writer of the poem that became the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Scriven was interred here in 1886, in an unmarked grave between his fiancée Eliza and Commander Pengelly; decades later, townspeople and national figures raised funds for a proper monument, unveiled on May 24, 1920 by Ontario Premier E. C. Drury. Many hymn histories trace Scriven’s text to a private letter written in Port Hope in the mid-1850s, later set to music by Charles C. Converse, proof that a world-famous song can spring from the quietest corner of a pioneer cemetery.

Pengelly Family Cemetery – Joseph M. Scriven

And one last pairing to close the circle: back to Algonquin’s Canoe Lake. The Mowat plot is tiny, but in September 1917 Thomson’s friends also raised a memorial cairn at Hayhurst Point, a place you can still reach by paddle, a low stack of stones that pulls artists and canoeists like a magnet each summer. So, Leith holds the official record and family monument; Canoe Lake holds the working memory of a painter who loved jack pines and waning light. Ontario’s pioneer cemeteries are like that, official and unofficial, cared-for and forgotten. They’re places where a township’s first decade can survive as a handful of names, where a vanished village remains in the curve of a fence line, where a painter both is and isn’t. And if you walk softly, you can hear the provinces’ earliest roads in the grass.

Hayhurst Point – Tom Thomsom Memorial

Quick etiquette & safety notes

• Many of these are on private property—always seek permission and never disturb markers or fencing. Niagara Falls explicitly warns about this on its pioneer cemeteries page.
• In Ontario, municipalities may assume responsibility for abandoned cemeteries under provincial law, but that doesn’t make them public parks. Check local pages before visiting.

Private Cemetery Sign