The cemetery was opened during the 1850s to replace the Strangers' Burying Ground, which had been established in 1826 and closed in 1855. It is part of the non-profit Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries, which also includes Mount Pleasant Cemetery and York Cemetery in Toronto, among others.
Henry Box Brown, African American who famously escaped slavery in 1848 by mailing himself in a custom-made box from Richmond to Philadelphia. He later became a lecturer and entertainer, spending his last two decades in Toronto.[citation needed]
Royal Air Force pilots Durlin D. Bushell, Augustus White, Howard Harris and Arthur Green; died from Spanish flu (1918)
Kay Christie (1911–1994) – Canadian Nursing Sister in Hong Kong during the Japanese Invasion during World War II. One of two Canadian Nursing sisters to have been held as a Prisoner of War.
Mollie Christie (1913–2013) – Prominent figure in the early days of Toronto's social welfare services; Founding Executive Director of the Community Information Centre of Metropolitan Toronto (now accessible by "211" help line and 211.ontario.ca website)[3]
Ainsworth Dyer – a corporal in Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and died in Afghanistan in 2002
Robert Alexander Fyfe (1816–1878) – Canadian educator, churchman (first President of Woodstock College).
Ned Hanlan – world-champion oarsman. Hanlan's Point Beach was named after the family hotel at Hanlan's Point, built c. 1870 by his father, John, a fisherman-turned-hotelier.
Samuel Lount Upper Canada MLA; an organizer of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, for which he was hanged, and so made martyr to the Upper Canadian Reform movement.
Beverly Randolph Snow (1799–1856). Born enslaved he was manumitted in 1829. Snow became an early black entrepreneur and restaurateur in Washington DC and then Toronto. In August 1835 his Epicurean Eating House was destroyed by a white mob during a race riot subsequently known as the "Snow Riot" or "Snow Storm".
Joseph Burr Tyrrell (1858–1957) – discovered that dinosaurs once roamed Alberta's Bad Lands
David Ward (1817–1881) & Family, English-born settler of Ward's Island, interred along with four of his five daughters at Plot F-157. David was a fisherman and hotelier for whom Ward's Island was named. Lost his five surviving daughters to drowning in Lake Ontario on May 11, 1862, in a boating mishap. A son, William, survived. (William's first wife, Charlotte Ford, also died young, of tuberculosis, and is also interred here. A close friend, rower Ned Hanlan, above, had served as a witness to their wedding.)[5]
The cemetery contains the war graves of 34 Commonwealth service personnel, 29 from World War I and five from World War II. Most of these are in Section X.[6]
The Necropolis is the final resting place of such prominent individuals as Toronto's first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, journalist George Brown, founder of what is now The Globe and Mail, John Ross Robertson, founder of the Toronto Telegram, and, more recently, Federal NDP Leader, Jack Layton.
