IYA Cemetery Tour - Ross Bay Cemetery - Mar 22, 2009

Mar 22, 2009 1:45pm - IYA Cemetery Tour - Ross Bay Cemetery - Astronomy has long been a hobby and profession in Victoria. This first-time tour by Joyce Mackie marked the International Year of Astronomy by tracing the lives of those buried at Ross Bay Cemetery connected to this far out topic.  Phone 250-598-8870 or www.oldcem.bc.ca

Today (March 22) I took part in one of the more unusual events happening anywhere in connection with the International Year of Astronomy, the Star Gazers tour of Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria.

The Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria holds tours on various topics most Sundays at Ross Bay, and occasionally at other cemeteries in the Victoria area. As a member of the Old Cemeteries Society and as a neighbour of the cemetery, I was looking forward to this tour, particularly because I had seen little evidence of Victoria's astronomical history amongst the gravestones of Ross Bay, which opened in the 1870s.

Tour leader Joyce Mackie began by discussing the history of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Saanich, and its important leaders such as Dr. John Plaskett and Dr. Robert Petrie. Neither of them are buried at Ross Bay, and their graves are more likely to be found at Royal Oak Cemetery in Saanich, which supplanted Ross Bay at Victoria's primary cemetery in the 1930s.

Most interesting to me was the final stop in the tour, the unmarked grave of Oregon Columbia Hastings, an American who had set up a photography business when he moved to Victoria. In 1891, Hastings built a home on St. Charles Street between present-day Rockland Ave. and Fort St., near the site of the present-day water tower. Behind the home, Hastings built the first observatory in Victoria, and for a number of years the area was known as Observatory Hill. When Hasting's fortunes deteriorated after the turn of the century, the Hastings family moved and Hastings' telescope was moved to what became the Gonzales meteorological observatory.

Mackie's tour features the Gonzales observatory and Edmund Baynes Reed, who helped set it up and is also buried at Ross Bay. Francis Napier Denison, who took over from Baynes Reed, is the best-known name attached to the observatory, which remains a major landmark in Fairfield.

The tour also featured the graves of a number of soldiers and sailors who came to Victoria after having been trained in navigation and navigational astronomy, including William John Sutton, whose funeral notice in 1914 included a note urging RASC members to attend his funeral. Others included Edgar Crow Baker, trained in the Royal Navy, and Lt. Peter Keech, who is best known for finding gold in Leechtown up the Island. Mackie also discussed the life of William Trent, a British journalist who lived and died in Victoria after having helped set up an astronomy group in Leeds. Trent recruited famed astronomer John Herschel, son of Sir William Herschel, to serve as honourary president of the group in Leeds.

Mackie also showed the tour some astronomy-themed graves in Ross Bay, including one gravestone topped by a sphere, another with a statue of an angel crowned with a star, and the grave of a J.H. Starr.

Chris Gainor