In Hamilton that Saturday morning, a day and a half after the calamity, arrangements for funeral services and burials were being made. Although funeral homes were just starting to provide embalming and dressing services, the norm was still for the funeral procession to start from the residence of the deceased or from a relative or friend’s home. After the funeral service, held in a place of worship, the departed were taken to the cemetery.
The more severe winters experienced in the nineteenth century, combined with the rudimentary tools then available to gravediggers, constituted something of a problem. Given that the ice in the canal was reported to be two-feet thick, it is clear that the ground would have been hard frozen. Interment in family vaults was straightforward: the capstone had only to be lifted and the casket carried down to be sealed in its niche. Some gravesites were prepared ahead of time, in milder weather, doubtless discomforting should the intended occupant become aware of the preparations. For the most part, however, winter burials were simply accommodated in communal vaults until the ground was sufficiently thawed. In the Hamilton cemetery such a storage vault, now abandoned, is built deep into the side of the escarpment. The mind easily conjures macabre images of the frenetic haste that must have occurred each spring as cemetery workers wallowed in the wet, malodorous earth to dig graves of sufficient depth. Every increased degree of warmth that made their job easier only increased the urgency of completing their task before the warmth penetrated the stacked coffins deep in the hillside.
The weather register for Hamilton in March 1857 shows the conditions that prevailed around the date of the wreck. On the day of the disaster the thermometer hovered well below 0°Celsius. In contrast to conditions a day or two earlier, the notation on the day of the accident read “sleighing gone.”
Hamilton Spectator, April 7, 1857.
The prominence of many of the victims resulted in some truly impressive displays of sombre respect. Among the first funerals to be held was that of the Reverend Theodore Heise, whose disfigured remains were escorted by an ecumenical bevy of clergy and a procession of native Germans along with their wives and children, who formed his congregation. Another interment that Saturday was John Sharpe, the partially crippled, half-blind keeper of a bookstall at the Hamilton station.
Sunday morning the churches were packed to capacity. Congregations eschewed finery and the pulpits altars and galleries were draped in black. The music selected and the sermons reflected the despondence of the flock, and the services were interrupted by occasional stifled cries.
In the afternoon the funerals recommenced. Alexander Burnfield, the twenty-nine-year-old locomotive engineer, was carried into the Hamilton Cemetery (then frequently referred to as the Burlington Cemetery). At the head of the procession was the Great Western’s Locomotive superintendent, accompanied by the foremen from the Toronto and Hamilton shops and several hundred of Burnfield’s fellow employees. His grave, apparently, was ready to receive him. The reporter from the Hamilton Spectator described the gravediggers, begrimed with the evidence of their trade, as barely having completed their work before the funeral party arrived. An eloquent graveside service was reportedly listened to attentively before the Scottish-born Burnfield was committed to the ground to be grieved by his widow and young family.
The cortèges of John Henderson and Mrs. P.S. Stevenson (wife of the sherriff) were formed in a single procession for the journey to the cemetery. Following the single hearse were more than a hundred carriages and a great many mourners on foot. Henderson was the brother-in-law of C.J. Brydges, managing director of the Great Western, a respected astronomer, a telegraphic engineer, and a former employee of the railway. The Great Western was represented by a number of officials, several directors, and a great number of workers who had met the oncoming procession after departing from Burnfield’s interment. Also present were the mayor and a number of councilors.
The ceremonies for former-city counselor Donald Stuart were held at St. Mary’s Church. So packed was it that thousands were unable to gain access. Scarcely had Stuart’s coffin been dispatched to the Catholic cemetery than its place was taken by two: those of the sisters Ellen and Mary Devine. A short ceremony was conducted and they too were on the way to the cemetery.
After a funeral service in the Park Street Baptist Church the remains of the Reverend Alfred Booker were taken to the cemetery in a procession sixty carriages long followed by a crowd on foot. Heading the procession was his son Major Booker — the same who several years earlier marched at the head of the triumphal parade inaugurating Great Western service to Hamilton and had also marshalled his force at the disaster scene to impose order. Now leading a double column of his Artillery Company, dressed in plainclothes with crepe armbands, he paid his last tributes to his stern father. The militia formed-up at the entrance, providing a lane down which passed the hearse and nearly every clergyman in the city.
All that Sunday the city was preoccupied with grieving. The church bells rang first for the Sabbath services then with the mournful tolling for the succession of funerals.
If it were possible, Monday was an even more sombre day. That was the day the council had declared as a “day of public humiliation.” Normal business activities were suspended, flags flew at half-mast, and divine services were held in all the churches both morning and afternoon. Two funeral cortèges met at the corner of York and MacNab streets — a short distance from the cemetery gates. They were those of popular marine captain James Sutherland, and the young barrister and son of Hamilton’s first mayor, Adam Ferrie Junior. Combined, the two funerals exceeded the seemingly endless length of the previous day’s processions. No less than 140 carriages joined in the journey to the cemetery. Leading the procession were the mayor and the Corporation of Hamilton along with the police force. Sutherland’s casket was draped in the Union Jack and carried on an open cart. Immense numbers attended the ceremonies at the burial ground. Among the monuments marking the graves of other members of his prominent family a broken stone column surmounted by a carved wreath still stands over Adam Ferrie’s resting place. The break in the column is deliberate — intended to recognize a life cut short. Adam Ferrie was just twenty-four years old.
While Hamilton was going about the ceremonial business of burying its dead, Clifton (now part of Niagara Falls, Ontario) was organizing a funeral extravaganza for its most flamboyant citizen, Samuel Zimmerman. If the newspaper reports are even half correct the Zimmerman funeral was the most spectacular witnessed in this country and may not have been eclipsed yet. As well as being an exceptionally prominent and well-connected financier and a generous philanthropist, Zimmerman was an active Freemason and his funeral was to be conducted with the full rites of that organization.
The following report in the Spectator was widely reprinted throughout southern Ontario:
On Monday morning, March 16th a numerous band proceeded to the cars on their way to Niagara Falls, his late residence. A crowd of brethren swelled the throng at every station along the road. At the bridge, those from the United States joined the sad array. Their cars were festooned with curtains of lustrous white and sombre black sustained and fixed by large rosettes between the alternate windows. Their locomotive was also similarly covered, and black crepe muffled its sounding bell. The Erie and Ontario road was opened especially for the occasion, and a long train of cars passed more than once between the stations, at the bridge and at the Falls, freighted with a host of masons.
At the Clifton House, the large assembly met, and filled the great hall close by. There were the powerful contractor and the poor day labourer, the merchant prince and the humble clerk, the man of boundless acres and the backwoodsman, eminent members of the legislature, the press, the bar, and all other professions. There was the centarian, gray with years, the youth just budding into manhood, and the “Lewis” the scion of a Masonic race. There was the venerable High Priest in his long white robe, with the golden mitre upon his head and the golden breast plate upon his bosom.
The assembly climbed the hill to the Zimmerman residence on the escarpment, where the body lay, and there formed a funeral