A 202-acre National Historic Site, designed like a garden

Toronto's Historic Cemeteries

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is a designated National Historic Site laid out like a 19th-century garden — and the final resting place of the same insulin co-discoverer covered elsewhere in this guide.

The grave of Frederick Banting at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto — Frederick Banting's grave, Mount Pleasant Cemetery — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Toronto's historic cemeteries are, unusually, genuine destinations in their own right — sprawling 19th-century landscape design projects that happen to also serve as burial grounds.

A garden, designed as a garden (1876)

Mount Pleasant Cemetery opened in 1876 on 202 acres of former farmland, designed by German-born landscape architect Henry Adolph Engelhardt in the "garden cemetery" style popular across 19th-century Europe and North America — modeled partly on Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery. Kilometres of winding drives and walking paths run past fountains, statuary and rare, deliberately planted trees, a deliberate design philosophy that treated cemeteries as public parks as much as burial sites. It was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 2000.

Who's actually buried there

Mount Pleasant's notable burials read like a cross-section of Canadian history: former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King; Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin, covered in our medical history guide; broadcaster Foster Hewitt, the original "Voice of Hockey"; pianist Glenn Gould; and Canada's first female surgeon, Jennie Smillie-Robinson. The cemetery also holds 231 Commonwealth war graves from the two World Wars.

The Necropolis: the older option

Before Mount Pleasant, Toronto's main non-denominational burial ground was the Necropolis, in Cabbagetown — established in 1850, and largely full by the time Mount Pleasant opened, which is precisely why the newer cemetery was built in the first place.

Sources

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