A two-and-a-half-hectare plot near Bloor and Yonge streets, Potter's Field was opened in 1826 but closed in 1855 because it was deemed an impediment to the growth of the quickly expanding village of Yorkville. By 1881, more than 900 bodies from Potter's Field had been moved to the Necropolis (Greek for "city of the dead"), which had opened in 1850 in Cabbagetown.

"The original Cabbagetown was a poor neighbourhood," says George Rust-D'Eye, a lawyer and historian who lives three blocks from the cemetery. "People lived in shacks or very low-grade houses with outhouses. It was an unhealthy place, and in 1832 and 1834, there were cholera epidemics."

Occupying more than seven hectares of prime land on the west side of Toronto's Don Valley, the Necropolis is today a quiet place in a beautiful setting with a variety of flowering shrubs and trees, including large red oaks older than the cemetery itself, weeping elms, black locust trees, sugar maples, white elms, pines and a cucumber tree. Just across the road is Riverdale Park and a pioneer farm (once the Toronto Zoo), with cows, horses, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks and geese, and a respectable vegetable garden in the summer, when bands play on Sundays.

The Necropolis can't compete in rustic quaintness with the picket-fenced graves whose markers tell the story of the gold rush in Barkerville, B.C. Nor does it attest to disaster, as does the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, with its rows of small grey stone markers, each with the same date, April 15, 1912, the day the Titanic sank. And it can't evoke the terrible sadness that Quebec's Grosse-Île does. This island is located in the St. Lawrence River 50 kilometres downstream from Quebec City, and it was there that the victims of typhus were buried in mounds, one stacked upon the other. A small monument on the site reads: "In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of 5424 persons who flying from Pestilence and Famine in Ireland in the year 1847 found in America but a Grave."

The Necropolis, however, is remarkable for the history it has witnessed in the heart of Canada's largest city. It has borne witness to the life and times of the notable, the ordinary and the unknown who lived, worked and died in Toronto. Their stories are of local importance and in some cases national significance. They chronicle hardship, disease, rebellion, war, epidemics, civil accomplishment, love and loss. "You see history all around you," says Rust-D'Eye. "I see the Necropolis as a sort of catalogue of people who lived and worked in Toronto over the years."

THE FIRST NAME entered in the cemetery's many interment registers – kept in the small office next to the cemetery's chapel and written in beautiful copperplate handwriting – is Andrew Porteous, who died on December 16, 1849, at the age of 69. His body was stored in a vault at the cemetery until after the spring thaw; it wasn't until May 22, 1850, that he was finally buried. Neither cause of death nor any other pertinent facts were recorded. Among those moved to the Necropolis from Potter's Field were Peter Matthews and Samuel Lount, both of whom were executed for treason for their part in the Rebellion of 1837. The two were hanged side by side and buried in the same plot. A plaque at their gravesite reads:

A few hundred metres from where Matthews and Lount are buried is the grave of William Lyon Mackenzie, newspaper editor, first mayor of Toronto and leader of the doomed rebellion. Unlike his followers Matthews and Lount, Mackenzie fled across the border to escape the hangman's noose and lived in New York State. After 12 years, he was pardoned and returned to Canada, where he was elected to Parliament. His headstone, under a large Celtic cross, reads: "William Lyon Mackenzie, Born 12th March 1795, Died 28th August 1861." No mention is made of his role or place in Canadian history.

The man who ran for Parliament against Mackenzie was George Brown, the founding publisher of The Globe and a Father of Confederation. Brown was shot in his office by a drunken former employee and died of his wounds in 1880 at age 61. He, too, is buried in the Necropolis, within waving distance of Mackenzie's grave. His assailant, George Bennett, was hanged.

Two other journalists of note rest in the Necropolis. One, Charles Lindsey, who died in 1908, was the son-in-law of Mackenzie and editor-in-chief of the Toronto Daily Leader. He was buried in the Mackenzie family plot. The other was John Ross Robertson, the founder of The Evening Telegram, who died in 1918. As a young journalist, he had been jailed by Louis Riel because he "looked like a dangerous character." Robertson raised funds to build Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and supported many other causes.

The remains of a number of local politicians are also to be found in the Necropolis. William Peyton Hubbard (1842–1935), a popular black city alderman, was nicknamed Cicero of Council by his colleagues and served as acting mayor in 1906 and 1907. Ralph Day (1898–1976) was mayor from 1938 to 1940, and on his headstone is inscribed the motto Suis Stat Viribus (He stands by his own powers).

Other occupants were first in their endeavours. Thornton Blackburn, who died in 1890, was a former slave who made his way to Canada on the "Underground Railroad" and established the first cab company in Toronto. Anderson Ruffin Abbott (1837–1913), the first Canadian-born black graduate of the University of Toronto's school of medicine, was a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War. Joseph Burr Tyrrell (1858–1957) discovered that dinosaurs once roamed Alberta's Bad Lands. And Ned Hanlan (1855–1908) had many firsts – he was a six-time world champion oarsman.

Throughout Toronto's early years and well into the 20th century, causes of death were listed in the cemetery's interment books along with the names of the dead, a practice no longer followed. As with cemeteries of a similar age, the Necropolis reveals that death could come from a variety of natural and other causes: bilious fever, liver complaint, consumption, smallpox, dysentery, scarlet fever, dropsy, whooping cough and cramp in the heart among them. Martha Ford, age nine months, fell victim to teething. Martha Smith, 36, died in an asylum of exhaustion. Isaiah Sewell, 17, was murdered. Gracie Johnston, 24, succumbed to decline. Isabella Anne Gamble, three, died of stagnation of the heart. And Rose, Jane, Cecilia, Phoebe and Mary Ward, sisters ranging in age from five to 13, drowned on May 11, 1862.

October 1918 stands out. It was the early stage of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, the worst influenza epidemic in history, in which at least 20 million (some estimates suggest 100 million) people died around the world, 50,000 of them in Canada. The pages for October record 80 deaths, 66 of them caused by the Spanish flu, which struck with amazing speed, often killing victims within hours of the first signs of infection. Oddly, it tended to kill the young and healthy, a fact indicated by the ages of many of its victims buried in the cemetery, such as George G. Stewart, 26; William Rendle, 30; Gertrude Scarrett, 38; Walter Holliday, 24; and William White, 27.

The epidemic was brought to Canada by soldiers returning from the Great War. Although they survived the war, many succumbed to the flu. Buried side by side, for example, are four members of the Royal Air Force: Durlin D. Bushell, Augustus White, Howard Harris and Arthur Green. All but one of them was in his late teens or twenties; all died of the flu in Toronto between October 19 and November 2, 1918.

The Necropolis has its share of war dead, too. Ensign Malcolm McEachren and Sergeant Hugh Matheson of the Queen's Own Rifles, a Toronto regiment, both fell in the Fenian Raid of 1866 at Ridgeway in southwestern Ontario as the Irish-American organization invaded Canada in the cause of a free Ireland. In a shared plot are the remains of Private Bert Brown, 17, and Private F. Branch, 21, both of the 134th Battalion. They "both died for freedom" on July 25, 1916. Those who died on foreign battlefields in the Second World War were buried in cemeteries close to where they were killed. Headstones across the country, however, recall the service of those who survived the war but died years later at home. One such soldier buried in the Necropolis is Robert Wylie McCabe, a major with the Irish Regiment of Canada who served as aide-de-camp to General Charles Foulkes and was at his side at the unconditional surrender of the Germans in Holland in 1945. The most recent victim of war buried in the cemetery is Ainsworth Dyer, who grew up in nearby Regent Park. Dyer, a corporal in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, was 24 years old when he was killed by "friendly fire" in April 2002. His funeral was one of the largest in recent memory at the Necropolis; on his modest headstone is a word that says a great deal – Afghanistan.

In all, the remains of nearly 50,000 people have been buried at the Necropolis, and almost 30,000 more have been cremated in its crematorium, which was built in 1933, the first in Ontario. Like other old cemeteries across Canada, the Necropolis is a history book, a record of events, great and small, and of lives lived.

Photography: Kevin Kelly