Persistent Romance: Landscape, Canadianness, and Kingston’s Cataraqui Cemetery, 1850–1900

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-19th century, garden cemeteries were founded across North America and Europe as a solution to the growing problem of overcrowded urban graveyards. Although the garden cemetery was a practical innovation in burial, these burial spaces also carried cultural meaning as symbols of modernity and progress. Using Canada’s first garden cemetery, Cataraqui Cemetery, in Kingston, Ontario, as a case study, this article situates Canadian cemetery design and development within broad transnational trends, such as the use of the picturesque in cemetery design and the commodification of burial, while assessing the place of the garden cemetery within the local context of industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of nationalism in the post-Confederation period. By emphasizing that the garden cemetery movement emerged at a critical point of national and industrial development for Canada, this article provides an entry point for the examination of romantically derived modalities as the visual and cultural vernacular of Canadian nationalism in the late 19th century.