Victoria’s Pioneer Square: ‘God’s Forgotten Acre’

It’s natural to think that a cemetery is sacrosanct—a place where time virtually stands still amid an oasis of marble headstones, shading trees and quiet, all of them impervious to time and change.

If only such were the case.

It’s also natural to think that desecration by neglect and vandalism are a phenomenom of this modern and jaded world. Again, it isn’t so.

A case in point, and one that’s startling because of its prominent location and its historical and cultural significance, is Victoria’s historic Quadra Street Cemetery which is now a park known as Pioneer Square. There’s more human drama packed beneath the soil of this grassy square with its canopy of massive planes trees than can be found almost anywhere else on Vancouver Island.

Before I moved to Cobble Hill, I spent many a sunny Sunday photographing the Victoria waterfront. Ogden Point held special attraction for me with its busy docks where Ross Carriers jostled in and about the piles of lumber at breathtaking speed as they loaded the freighters moored alongside with B.C. lumber. Then, invariably, it was up the hill past St. Joseph’s Hospital and Christ Church Cathedral to the Quadra Street Cemetery aka the Quadra Street Burying Ground, what I’ve always known as (appropriately) Pioneer Square.

It was a mystery to me the first time I saw it—most of the headstones were lined up against the back fence, the grass interrupted only along the south and western edges by a few larger, time-worn monuments. What kind of cemetery was this? Why weren’t the grave markers set out, as is the usual case, in a grid like candles on a birthday cake?

It turned out that there was more to it than my first suspicion—that the city works department just wanted to cut the grass quicker and cheaper. The sad reality was that the cemetery had been neglected for so long, and the work of vandals was so extensive, that it had reached a point that many of the headstones, before they were gathered up and put against the fence, couldn’t be matched to their graves!

How in heaven’s name, one might ask, could this have come to be?

I’ll tell you that and more next week.

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