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Boot Hill: Stories from the British Columbia Penitentiary Cemetery
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This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, -- Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself |
BackgroundIn 1985 the site of the former British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster, BC, which had languished unoccupied for several years, was sold by the federal government to a private developer. Over the course of nearly a decade, the property was redeveloped as premium housing – a community of landscaped, adults-only condominiums overlooking the Fraser River and, higher up the hill, larger homes for the well-to-do. Two former penitentiary buildings were renovated as heritage properties, and the rest were razed.Unbeknownst to most local residents, included in a parcel carved from the penitentiary lands and donated by the developer to the City of New Westminster was the penitentiary cemetery, destined to become part of Glenbrook Ravine Park. The cemetery -- known to some as "Boot Hill" -- thereby became the institution's third surviving feature. Hidden from view, the BC Penitentiary convicts’ cemetery abuts the eastern boundary of the now vacant Woodlands Institution. It is otherwise bordered by the ravine, the back yards of neighbouring town homes, and a dense blackberry bramble which continually threatens to overtake the entire property. The cemetery doesn't appear on maps, and the City of New Westminster doesn't advertise its existence. It's one of those places a handful of people have heard of, but no one can find. The cemetery contains forty-eight headstones, each bearing the three or four digit prisoner number of an inmate who died at the penitentiary between 1914 and 1968. Government and media records confirm at least one additional man was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near the site in 1913 -- local legend has it there were many more. It's a "pauper's cemetery" -- a burial place for prisoners whose families were too poor, too far away, or too estranged to claim their bodies after death. As a prison cemetery, it's a burial place for those whose lives were characterized by poverty, violence and misadventure.
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This WebsiteI've been researching the history of the BC Pen cemetery and the men interred there for some time. My research is informal -- the preoccupation of an amateur local historian living near the border of the former Pen. I suppose I'm seeking a better understanding of my community's real heritage -- our "inherited circumstances", as the Concise Oxford would have it.I could never have predicted how intimate a glimpse this research would permit into the lives of a small group of men once incarcerated in the penitentiary, nor how poignant a piece of our history would thereby be revealed. The following are links to more information:
Deborah McIntosh
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