Archaeological dig at Guelph's Baker Street parking lot starts
Work is expected to last six weeks, but could take longer if remains are found
Part of Guelph's Baker Street parking lot won't be accessible as the city begins an archeological investigation on Monday.
The Baker Street parking lot use to be the site of an all-faith cemetery between 1827 and 1853.
The city is currently working to redevelop Baker Street with plans to transform the parking lot and nearby properties into a mixed-use building.
The city plans to drill boreholes and install monitoring wells to assess groundwater quality and movement in the parking lot.
"We have an archeological team working to prepare the site for us before we start any of the drilling work," said Terry Gayman, the city's manager of infrastructure development and environmental engineering.
The archeological dig could take six weeks to complete, but it could take longer if remains are found.
Any remains found will be transferred to the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery, Gayman said.
Site of all-faith cemetery
The cemetery was established by the Canada Company in 1827, the same year Guelph was founded.
"The poorest of the poor were buried there. If you weren't a Catholic, this is where you would have been buried," said Olivia Harrison, a student at the University of Guelph who has been researching the cemetery at Baker Street.
The cemetery then closed in 1853 after Guelph passed a new bylaw banning human burials within city limits.
Harrison said bodies that had family still living in the area were moved to Woodlawn Memorial Park. Families moved some burials, but others remained on the site.
Possibly an Indigenous burial ground
Harrison is also investigating whether the site was an Indigenous burial ground before it became an early settler cemetery.
She is currently trying to backdate the cemetery to see if that's possible.
"We're trying to figure out exactly what was there in regards to Indigenous people," she said.
Settlers could have continued to use the Baker Street lot as a cemetery because the area was already cleared and could have had artifacts that resembled a burial ground, she adds.
"When establishing new towns, if there were Indigenous people in the area that had developed some sort of space, it came up often that settlers would take over that space and utilize it because it was often already cleared," she said.
City staff have reached out to several Indigenous communities, including the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation and the Métis Nation of Ontario.
Remains previously found
Human remains have been found at the Baker Street location before.
Bone fragments were found by city staff working in a section of buried tunnel under the parking lot in 2016.
Workers found the bone fragments after they shut off the water as part of a project to remove the parking booth at the Baker Street parking lot.
The remains of an infant found in 2010 were also reinterred to Woodlawn Memorial Park.
In 2005, remains of a man, woman, nine infants and 36 other incomplete remains were found while city staff were repairing a sink hole.
The remains were sent to the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery. An archeological investigation followed in 2006.
Dana Poulton, president of D.R. Poulton and Associates, an archeological consulting firm in London, was part of that 2006 investigation.
"Anytime archeologists get to investigate a cemetery, it's like a window into the past of a particular community," Poulton said, noting they didn't find any headstones or brass plates on any of the coffins they found.
"The only stories that we can read are the ones the bones tell us."
The excavation in 2006 contained the remains of 20 adults, two teenagers and 21 children.