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Surrounded by a sea of suburbia on the south Mountain, there’s a tiny 19th Century graveyard that is catching attention these days.

The Young family cemetery on Upper Wellington Street was recently recognized with a Hamilton Municipal Heritage Committee Award because of its historic value and the fact that it is in much better shape than early settler burial sites tend to be.

Charles Dimitry, who is vice chair of the heritage committee, says he nominated the cemetery for the award to acknowledge the “great care” in maintaining it. The upkeep is managed by the City of Hamilton, but Young family members and nearby residents have also helped over the years.

The 80 by 85-foot burial ground south of Stone Church Road was established in the 1830s and had its last burial in the 1950s. Shaded by mature trees, the chain-link fence around it is sturdy, the grounds are well trimmed and the eight or so grave markers are in reasonably good shape.

“I grew up near Upper James and Limeridge and have always been amazed about how many little family cemeteries there are on Hamilton Mountain,” says Dimitry. “Many of them are not in very good condition. But the Young cemetery stands out for being well maintained.”

That, however, was not always the case. Back in the 1970s, there were problems of neglect and vandalism and in 1990 there was a proposal to move the graves to Mount Hamilton Cemetery on Rymal Road. But that plan was rejected, and residential development ended up going around the Young family graveyard, rather than through it.

One nearby cemetery that is much less exemplary today is the Ryckman Family Cemetery, says Dimitry. It’s about a kilometre west of the Young Cemetery, in a field off Upper James Street. The fence needs work, plants are overgrown and there have been problems with vandalism.

This summer bulldozers have been clearing land near the Ryckman graveyard to make way for residential development. A spokesperson for the City of Hamilton says the cemetery will stay where it is, and a road or pathway will have to be built for access. Hopefully, the grave site will get spruced up along the way.

The Young Cemetery also has a connection to a strange event that happened four kilometres away in 1982. As I recounted in an October 2020 Flashbacks column, a demolition crew discovered a large piece of a gravestone in a wall cavity of a house at Upper Wellington, near Queensdale. More recently I learned the cemetery marker was from the Young Cemetery.

The broken gravestone is interesting because the home it was in was allegedly haunted. Spectator compositor Norm Bilotti, who lived in an apartment in the house during the early 1970s, complained that he and his then wife Sherrie had been awakened on two occasions by a strange apparition of a legless, wild-haired woman.

Bilotti’s ghost story was chronicled in a long feature story in The Spectator in 1971. So, it was a weird coincidence to discover a cemetery marker in the same wall from where Norm’s ghost appeared 11 years later.

The gravestone was inscribed with the names of two babies — Martha Louisa from 1888 and Emma Grace from 1879. No surname was visible.

I connected it to the Young graveyard because the names and dates show up on the Young family tree that is featured on a metal plaque at the cemetery. Both youngsters died before their first birthday.

I talked to three Young descendants, and none of them knew how the stone ended up in the wall cavity of a house down the street from the cemetery. Nor did they know what happened to it after the stone was recovered in the demolition.

But they did know about another strange story from the family’s history that involved “Hamilton’s first murder mystery” and that tale is told on a second plaque at the Young cemetery.

Young family members were loyalist settlers who were among the first farmers on Hamilton Mountain in the early 1800s. Daniel Young (1755-1836), with his wife Dorothy Elizabeth (1763-1830), fled to British North America after he fought on the side of the British during The American Revolution.

After Daniel died, he passed on his land to his children and a portion of it was used for the family cemetery that today is off Upper Wellington.

In 1827, Daniel Young’s son John and his grandson Christopher found themselves accused of murdering a farm hand named Jesse Masters who allegedly was killed in a coal pit located on the property. A neighbour named John Sheeler claimed to have witnessed the murder and the Youngs were put on trial even though authorities could not find a body.

The Youngs were found not guilty, but a lot of people still thought they had committed the crime. So, in 1830 Young family members set out to find Masters. Miraculously, they located the former farm employee in New York state and talked him into returning with them to Ryckman’s Corners.

Clearly, reports of his murder had been greatly exaggerated. Sheeler was convicted of perjury and, according to a 1959 Maclean’s Magazine article, he became the last person in British North America to be punished by being pilloried.

If you want to learn more about old cemeteries in Hamilton, local historian Bill King is hosting a tour of “abandoned and forgotten cemeteries” in the lower city on Sunday July 24. “We search out the few remaining graveyards and tombstones in downtown Hamilton,” he says. The tour does not include the Young family graveyard but there are lots of others to visit. Meet at King and John streets at 10 a.m. The tour is free.

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