You’ll find it standing at the top of a hill high above Grenadier Pond, erected in a small clearing ringed by trees. It’s a massive monument, a towering pile of boulders topped by a marble cross, surrounded by a black iron fence. The cairn is there to protect the bones of one Toronto’s most prominent Victorian couples. This is where you’ll find the Howards.
John Howard was Toronto’s leading architect in the middle of the 1800s, the man who designed part of Osgoode Hall, the Provincial Lunatic Asylum (at 999 Queen Street, where the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health stands now), plus banks and houses and elegant office blocks. But he did far more than just design buildings. He was an accomplished artist who taught at Upper Canada College. He was a justice of the peace and an associate judge. He was a militia member who fought against Mackenize’s rebels. And he was an engineer who once took a young Sandford Fleming under his wing, and who laid out Toronto’s first sidewalks and sewers, as well as many new streets and bridges. Two centuries later, Torontonians still live in a city John Howard helped create.
But he didn’t do it alone. While he worked himself to the point of exhaustion, helping transform Toronto into a thriving metropolis, his wife, Jemima, was right there by his side. They’d left England together to come to Canada in 1832. She was a painter herself, made copies of his plans and drawings, kept him organized, and even helped write his diary. They had a house downtown near King and York Streets, and together they bought a big country estate to the west of the growing city: an expanse of hills, forest, and creeks that ran all the way from the lakeshore up to Bloor Street. Howard designed a second home for them there: Colborne Lodge, a museum today. They moved in just a few weeks after Howard helped put down Mackenzie’s rebellion. The picturesque cottage had a commanding view from the top of the hill it was built on — a view that inspired Jemima to call their estate High Park.
In many ways, it must have been a rewarding life: spending part of their time in the heart of the city they were helping to build, and part of it enjoying the rural pleasures of High Park. They kept much of their property as natural as possible — Howard was no fan of the carefully cultivated lawns and fountains that surrounded so many English manors — with just a few orchards and gardens near the house. Howard even hunted deer and quail on the property.
The couple didn’t keep all of these natural wonders to themselves. They welcomed visitors: soldiers from Fort York fished in Grenadier Pond, there was curling and skating in the winter, the city’s elite came to enjoy carriage rides and long walks through the trees. There were charity picnics, and even tenant farmers who harvested wheat and alfalfa from the slopes of a big hill overlooking the pond. The Howards always wanted to share High Park with the people of Toronto.
But their life wasn’t quite as peaceful and uncomplicated as it must have seemed on the surface. John Howard had a secret. The respected architect had a second family.
For years, Howard had been sleeping with another woman. Mary Williams was from Northern Ireland, and it seems that she was just a teenager when their affair began, while Howard was in his late thirties. But the relationship was more than just a casual tryst. Howard and his mistress had three children together. He gave them financial support, built a house for them, chipped in with ideas for Christmas celebrations, and collected his children’s drawings. He made sure that when he died, they were included in his will.
But we don’t know much beyond those few details. It was, of course, a scandalous secret. It wasn’t the kind of relationship that would have been publicly acceptable in a city where the Church had enormous moral power, a place whose strict, conservative values were about to be immortalized in the nickname “Toronto The Good.” And so, it’s maybe not surprising that near the end of his life, Howard burned many of his personal papers in the fireplace, leaving little evidence behind. The autobiography he donated to the Toronto Public Library makes no mention of his affair. Historians have been left to cobble together whatever they can from the few hints available. Howard pencilled notes about his second family into his diary sometime after he and Jemima completed the first draft together. We can see that he had a suspicious habit of leaving the house at night right around the time he and Mary must have conceived their youngest child. Some suspect that Williams may have been a servant in the Howards’ household when the affair first began.
Still, to this day, no one is entirely sure whether Jemima knew what her husband was up to — in a city as small as Toronto was then, it’s quite possible she did. Given that she and John never had any children, there’s a chance it could even have been an arrangement they openly agreed upon. Or, at the very least, that he abided by the patriarchal conventions of the time: failing to be faithful, but ensuring his wife was never publicly embarrassed by his wandering ways.
Whether or not she knew about her husband’s affair, Jemima stayed with him for the rest of her life. And when her end began to draw near, John did everything he could to protect his wife. In life and in death.
Jemima Howard was seventy-three when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She suffered terribly. The opiates she took as a painkiller were powerful. She began to be clumsy and forgetful — sometimes, it seems, she didn’t recognize her husband at all. She was known to disappear — she was found wandering in the woods. The doctor at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum didn’t think she belonged there. So, instead, Howard hired a pair of nurses and customized the guest room at Colborne Lodge, where they were now living full time in their retirement. He installed an extra door just outside her room, with no inside doorknob, so Jemima wouldn’t be able to wander off into danger.
She was coming to the end of her life. But Howard wasn’t just planning to keep his wife safe while she was alive. He was already working on a plan to keep her safe in death, too. He was well aware of the morbid threat that awaited Toronto’s dead.
As the city grew, so did the demand for fresh corpses. Toronto’s first medical school had opened in the 1840s, and cutting open cadavers was an important part of a student’s education. The province passed an Anatomy Act, allowing for the unclaimed bodies of those who died in government-run hospitals and poor-houses to be used for anatomical dissections — as long as what was left of the remains were respectfully buried once the students were done. But over the course of a few decades, the number of those studying to become doctors grew from dozens to hundreds. As the city boomed, there weren’t enough unclaimed people dying to meet the demand.
The solution: some medical students became grave robbers. They snuck around cemeteries at night, digging up newly buried bodies to be carried off for dissection. By the time Jemima fell ill, bodysnatchers had been a problem in Toronto for decades. During the 1800s, the city was plagued by horror stories of empty coffins and missing corpses. Of farmers chasing medical students down Yonge Street trying to get their loved ones back. Of sentries posted to the military graveyard at Victoria Memorial Square near Fort York, protecting dead soldiers from shadowy men bearing spades, picks, and body bags. Of trunks oozing blood, shipped by train to Union Station.
To protect his wife’s corpse, Howard began to build a fortress of a tomb. It was a massive stone cairn: a pile of granite boulders weighing ten tons, topped by a marble Maltese cross. It would present quite a challenge to any medical student looking to get his hands on the Howards’ cadavers.
And he didn’t stop there. The tomb would also be protected by an iron fence with a storied past, one much older even than the city itself. Howard would have it shipped across the ocean from one of the most famous churches in the world.
St. Paul’s Cathedral had stood in London, England, since medieval times — but it was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666. In the wake of the blaze, the renowned architect Sir Christopher Wren was tasked with the job of rebuilding the church into the great domed landmark it is today. And Wren didn’t just design the church itself. He also designed a black, iron fence to surround the cathedral.
The fence protected the new St. Paul’s for more than a century. But when the cathedral grounds were being renovated, the old fence was going to be destroyed.
When Howard heard the news, he was appalled. He decided to save the historic fence. He bought it and arranged to ship it across the Atlantic, all the way up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, so he could use it as an additional layer of protection for his wife’s fortified tomb.
But the journey from London to Toronto was a perilous one. As it sailed into the narrowing mouth of the St. Lawrence, the steamship carrying the fence ran into a terrible storm. It was wrecked on the rocks and sank to the bottom of the great river — taking the fence down with it.
Howard refused to leave it there. He spent two years working on a plan to salvage the fence from the muddy bottom of the St. Lawrence, paying a small fortune for divers to go down and get it. The rescue operation cost even more than shipping the fence across the ocean had. And the diving team could only recover part of it. The portion they did manage to bring up to the surface was severely damaged; when it finally arrived in Toronto, what was left of the mangled fence was repaired at a foundry before taking its place in the shadow of the stone cairn.
By the time it was finished, the tomb had cost more than three thousand dollars to build (tens of thousands in today’s money). But it was ready and waiting when Jemima passed away in 1877, just a few months after the Howards’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Three long years of suffering were over; she could finally rest in one of the best-defended graves in Toronto.
John was devastated when she died. As he prepared to inter his wife under the towering pile of stones, he wrote a heartbreaking poem for her. He called it “The Tomb in High Park”:
A rustic cairn on hallowed ground,
Surmounted by a Mystic Cross;
O’ershadowed by some lofty oaks —
The sun’s bright rays through foliage pass;
Which lighting up the Mystic Cross,
Brings forth the symbol from the shade;
The rustic cairn all clothed with moss,
A glimmering light o’er it pervades.
But what of this to the old man
Who mourns the loved one laid below —
Those rustic stones so stately piled
To mark the spot where he must go!
For years, altho’ her mind was gone.
The dear one still was left with him;
Tho’ often times she knew him not,
Still was the ruin dear to him.
And why should he now cling to life —
Now all worth living for is gone:
With nothing left but care and strife,
But man, they say, was made to mourn.
John Howard would live another decade before he joined his wife beneath the stones, still taking the time to visit with Mary Williams and their only surviving child — though there’s no evidence they ever joined him at Colborne Lodge, or that they were there the day he was laid to rest in the tomb.
By then, the great stone cairn stood in the middle of a park. The Howards had given their country estate to the people of Toronto. Years before they died, they gifted their land to the city to be turned into a public park for everyone to enjoy. They simply asked to be allowed to live out their final years at Colborne Lodge with a yearly pension. They asked that the park be kept in a natural state, that alcohol never be allowed within it, and that it should always be known as High Park.
Finally, they asked that, in return for their remarkable gift, their resting place be taken care of forevermore — that their tomb would stand in Toronto as long as Toronto stands.
Today, High Park is one of the jewels of the city’s parks system — one of the most famous green spaces in the country — an expanse of forests and creeks surrounded by a buzzing metropolis. Countless Torontonians and tourists enjoy it every day, jogging and walking their dogs, fishing and skating on the pond, visiting the cherry blossoms or feeding the ducks. And as they do, the Howards are still there high on that hill next to Colborne Lodge, resting beneath their granite fortress, safe from grave robbers and the ravages of time. A century and a half after they were placed in their imposing tomb, John and Jemima Howard continue to keep watch over the park where they once lived.