Not exactly on topic, but of some interest to cemetery preservationists everywhere..
This is in the latest issue (20 March 2000) of McLeans magazine here in Canada...
ISLAND OF THE DEAD - Conservationists save an ancient Halifax graveyard.
"Brian Cuthbertson's boots are sodden as he makes his way up the heavily
treed incline on the point of land jutting into Halifax's North West Arm. He walks
carefully - the terrain on Deadman's Island is slippery, and has also been known to
yield the occasional surprise. 'They buried them in canvas bags in shallow, unmarked
graves,' the historian and author says of the 400 prisoners of war and immigrants who
interred on the island in the early 1800s. The dead, as a result, did not always stay
buried.......
"Whose bones those were will never be known. Deadman's Island - actually a
2.5 acre peninsula - offers a perfect view of the Armdale Yacht Club, just a hundred yards
across the water. There 200 years ago, stood the detention center for more the 8,000
American privateers and soldiers taken prisoner during the war of 1812, and 1,500 French
nationals captured during the Napoleonic War of the early 1800s. By Cuthbertson's
calculation 265 prisoners died there, most of them victims of typhus, dysentery and
smallpox that spread through their overcrowded and unsanitary quarters.........
Before long, others were also buried there: black slaves who had fled to the British
lines during the war of 1812 and later ended up in Nova Scotia, only to die of smallpox;
and Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine who succumbed to smallpox and typhus in
1847, when the prisoner of war camp was converted into a quarantine hospital. 'It is a
significant historical site,' says David Christianson, curator of archaeology at the
Nova Scotia Museum, 'a fascinating window into the history of early Halifax.'
That explains the uproar that broke out in 1998 when the developers who owned the
island announced plans to erect a 60-unit condominium complex on the land. At the time,
local historians had only word-of-mouth tales of wooden crosses and graves unearthed by
storms to explain how Deadman's Island got its name. But the thought of 19th-century
graves being disturbed to make way for pricey waterfront condos spurred preservationists
to buttress those old stories with concrete facts.
Leading the charge was the North West Arm Heritage Society, headed by Guy MacLean, the
former president of Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, who poured over British
admiralty records looking for records of deaths at the camp.
Municipal authorities, meanwhile, asked Cuthbertson, the former head of Heritage of
the Province of Nova Scotia, to conduct his own study to see if the island warranted
special protection. The developers themselves hired an archaeologist to conduct an
appraisal. Meanwhile, the Americans - with their reputation for honouring their military
dead wherever they have fallen - had joined in the fray. By last summer, several Ohio-area
historical societies had persuaded Ohio's two senators and a congressman to lobby the
US state department, the Canadian ambassador in Washington and the US veterans
administration to build a permanent memorial for the soldiers believed to be buried
there.
Eventually the islands owners accepted that their condominium dreams were stillborn. On
Feb 8, Halifax council voted to pay them $200,000 for the island. The city plans to extend
a walking and bicycle path, currently being built around North West Arm, on to the island.
American officials have indicated their willingness to erect a memorial on the island;
Mayor Walter Fitzgerald approves of the idea. It would be nice, he says, to leave the
island otherwise untouched, with the graves, or what is left of them after all this time,
overgrown - but not forgotten."