Historic graveyard gets federal cash contribution
Posted Dec 21, 2011 06:34:25 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
History buffs are applauding the federal government’s contribution of cash for a national historic site in the city’s south end.
Ottawa will give $21,500 to help pay for a $150,000 restoration project at the Old Burying Ground, where an estimated 12,000 people are buried.
Historian John Boileau tells News 95.7 they include some of the very first settlers to arrive in Halifax, in 1749.
“A lot of those people were in relatively poor health, they didn’t survive that first winter,” he said. “So a lot of burials from that first winter went into unmarked graves, because there were so many of them – upwards of 1000 – in the Old Burying Ground.”
The graveyard, at the corner of Barrington Street and Spring Garden Road, has about 1200 headstones and footstones, including markers for heroes of the War of 1812.
