“This is sort of an average people’s historic site and it’s a multicultural site; it reflects what British Columbia really looked like.” —Jaimie McEvoy, New Westminster.
You can thank a coincidence in my summer reading program for today’s Chronicle.
Hardly had I finished reading Four Walls In the West: The Story of the British Columbia Penitentiary, when I saw a Canadian Press article on the now-demolished penitentiary’s most poignant legacy, its overlooked and overgrown cemetery.
For just over a century (1878-1980), the B.C. ‘Pen’ on the north bank of the Fraser River in New Westminster confined thousands of convicted felons, many of them murderers and hardened criminals, some of them (including the legendary American train robber Bill Miner) notoriously so. But thousands of inmates served their time for lesser offences, terms as low as two years (the penitentiary’s legal minimum threshold), and upon release resumed their lives in society.
But not all of them lived to complete their sentences. Hence the cemetery which, after decades of neglect, has received some serious TLC.
According to the CP story, city councillor Jaimie McEvoy first came upon the cemetery while trying to take a photo of a coyote he’d followed into the bush beside the river. Amongst the thick tangle of brambles he noticed several large rocks which, upon closer inspection, bore numbers.
These were the numbers assigned to prisoners of whom at least 47 (those whose remains weren’t claimed by their families) were buried here between 1913 and 1968. But with the closing and demolition of most of the prison buildings, and despite the encroachment of housing, the cemetery had become overgrown and forgotten. Some of the graves, however, did show evidence of visitations and remembrances in the way of flowers.
McEvoy set out to improve things. Over the past two years the City of New Westminster has spent $26,000 to determine the size and scope of the graveyard by using scientific tools, and has worked with genealogists. The city’s goal is to maintain the site for its heritage value and as a “spiritual space.”
Said McEvoy: “British Columbia has a lot of historical sites that honour the colonial heritage and colonial officials. This is sort of an average people’s historic site and it’s a multicultural site; it reflects what British Columbia really looked like.”
By multicultural he’s referring to the fact that some of the cemetery’s residents were of Indigenous, Chinese, Hawaiian and African descent.
“In the lives of the prisoners, the crimes they were convicted of and how they were treated, it shows that whole social history of our province,” McEvoy explained.
The glaring contrast between the classes of prisoners and their punishment in a bygone age shows by the extremes of their crimes — murder to the theft of men’s socks worth all of $15. In effect, anyone, male and female, sentenced to more than two years’ incarceration.
Most of those buried here died of suicide and tuberculosis, both all too common threats to the mental and physical health of inmates of most prisons. The first recorded burial is that of Gim Kim (#1948), a Chinese inmate who was interred in 1914. The oldest, serving time as an habitual offender, was 72, the youngest interred here, Alphonse Duquette, was 18.
Another source, Niomi Sherwin, notes that “there have been reports of earlier burials in 1912 and 1913, most notably the burial of Joseph Smith (#1433) who was said to be buried in a far corner of the penitentiary grounds. Smith was the only prisoner who was hanged at the penitentiary for attempting to escape in October 1912 along with Herman Wilson (#1629) who was shot while trying to escape and died of his wounds.”
This isn’t quite correct. Smith was convicted of the shooting death of guard J.H. Joyson during his second attempt to escape. Although Joyson died from a wildly aimed bullet fired by a fellow guard, Smith was found to be responsible, convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. His was, in fact, the only hanging at the B.C. Penitentiary in its century-long existence, executions normally being conducted at the provincial jail, Oakalla.
Probably as a message to inmates, a gallows was erected within the jail grounds and on the morning of Jan. 31, 1913, thanks to the careful ministrations of executioner Ellis, Smith stepped into oblivion. But, broken neck or no, his heart continued to beat for a further 13 minutes. It was said that he faced the end stoically and without expressing remorse.
As further punishment unto eternity, the graves of Smith and Wilson are unmarked. For whatever reason, some other graves are also believed to be unmarked.
According to Sherwin, it’s thought that, prior to 1912-1913, prisoners were buried at the Douglas Road Cemetery which is now New Westminster Secondary School and the old Woodlands Institution grounds.
Harold Gordon McMaster (#3237) holds the dubious distinction of being the last inmate to be interred in the prison cemetery, as recently as Feb. 20, 1968.
The cemetery was divided into Protestant and Catholic sections, both of which made exceptions for other faiths as became necessary.
All burial details were handled by fellow prisoners, from building the caskets (for which they also made the nails), digging the graves and placing black-numbered stones on top as markers.
As noted, not all of the occupants of the cemetery have been identified. “The majority of them,” explained Rob McCulloch, manager of museum and heritage services, “we know their names, we know their age at death and we know for some of them, a bit about the crimes they committed. [But] the vast majority we don’t have details on what they were [imprisoned] for [or] their families to that end.”
To date, 47 graves have been confirmed but another 14 burials are suspected. Among the unknown graves is that of Lewis Colquhoum who helped the notorious Bill Miner hold up a westbound CPR express train in 1905; he died of pulmonary tuberculosis during the sixth year of his sentence.
Today, no longer forgotten and lost in a jungle of brambles and underbrush, the historic prison cemetery is open to the public with a walkway, interpretive signs and conserved grave markers.
That’s more than can be said for the penitentiary itself, of which only the gatehouse (now a sports bar) and the coal shed survive.
For those interested in learning more, death certificates of most of the inmates interred have been scanned and are available online at the B.C. Archives Genealogy website. These certificates give details of the inmates’ personal histories and identify the causes of death; the sad fact that so many of them were by suicide reflects, no doubt, on the harshness of prison life in “the good old days”.
