This is part one of a three part series on the research and scripting of the annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery.

Now in its 14th year, the annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery are an excellent way to experience historical narrative lifted off the written page. While it’s far more entertaining to learn about our local stories with an enjoyable theatrical tour of the local cemetery, the written page is the foundation of every story included on the tour.

As with most historical projects, the research for the annual tours always introduces me to new sources and stories, even stories in sources I’ve previously read and had missed while diligently hunting for some other story or theme. While a new story and theme each year means fresh research, the benefits far outweigh the extra effort.

This year’s walks are quite a different pace and tone from some of our previous spirit walks, which self-admittedly can tend to lean into celebrating local stories at the cost of appreciating the layers of humanity connected and intertwined.

Delicate stories, like the ones included this year, aren’t as comedic, but they are meaningful and moving and help us to understand that people of the past dealt with life’s problems, ups and downs, and moments of tragedy in much the same way we do today: with fortitude, strength, and help from family and friends. Those themes are clearly laid out in the newspapers that feed this year’s script. Reporters covering criminal cases, sometimes over weeks, detail the response of the community to the victim’s family, revealing a caring community amidst the sometimes “wild west” aspects of life in St. Catharines in the mid-Victorian period.

Readers will need to attend the tours to discover more about what I mean when I say “wild west” but while the newspapers themselves capture stories of the moment (with varying accuracy), those same newspapers allow us to understand the priorities and attitudes of the time. This year’s tour takes a broad look at justice in our community through the lens of criminal, victim, and judge (police magistrates and otherwise) and the results are surprising.

Of course, I also rely on a breadth of secondary material to help clarify and secure my own analysis. One such source is “Crime and Punishment in Upper Canada” by Janice Nickerson. Published in 2010, this guide to Upper Canadian law astutely describes and provides interpretation for a modern lay reader (surprise: I’m not a lawyer) because the contrasts between justice in the 1850s and 2025 are stark. Nickerson explains that, from the very beginning of the province, the attitude toward crime in Upper Canada was founded from a strong sense of moral probity. Since so many settlers to Upper Canada arrived from specifically conservative traditions, especially 18th and 19th century Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, it was the improbity of society and individuals which led to crime. Nickerson explains:

“In a deeply conservative society such as Upper Canada, crime was considered a natural extension of immorality. If the community was made up of morally upstanding citizens there would be no crime. But if immorality were to gain a foothold, crime would surely follow. So, it was important to enforce behaviour. Hence, breaking the Sabbath and blasphemy were indictable offences. And other kinds of moral order offences, such as drunk and disorderly, vagrancy, public nuisance, and prostitution landed people in jail nearly as often as offences we might today consider criminal.”

Justice was therefore designed to both punish criminals and aim to rectify the perceived lack of morals in individuals, families, governments, and society in general. Punishments rarely offered mercy or any chance for rehabilitation.

This approach to justice in Upper Canada wasn’t unique but it did set up a justice system that, from our modern perspective, overemphasized the criminality of substance abuse and addictions, poverty, and those struggling with mental health disorders. This contrast is quite clear in cases of drunk and disorderly behaviour, specifically where typical punishments included 21 days in jail, and to the delight of the newspapers: your name published for all to see and shame. Pair the government’s heavy-handed response to petty crimes with the lack of any social support and folks facing addictions or substance abuse became repeat offenders.

The fixation for a moral solution to society’s problems mixed into the awkwardly administered justice system (a layer of courts administered in diverse ways for different crimes) meant a stark imbalance of the crime-to-punishment ratio that we might expect. The result of my research this year shows that while a drunk-and-disorderly conviction might land you 21 days in jail, so too could stealing fence rails, or (interestingly) selling “bad meat” at the farmer’s market. In some ways, sentences feel as if they are minimum sentences automatically applied to a list of convictions. Cases like assault and murder, on the other hand, relied on investigations and testimony, and the complications of putting a case together frequently led to acquittal. In one case, the police magistrate offered to talk to offender Edward Lynch “man to man” after Lynch assaulted his wife and was only convicted and jailed after he did it a second time. Meanwhile, local jails were full of minor offences like “fractious driving,” leaving employment before the end of a contract, and even stealing a set of dominoes!

It’s this imbalance of the application of justice, which runs through all the source materials – letters, diaries, court records, jail lists, summaries of convictions, and most of all, newspapers – that threads the many narratives of crime together in this year’s walks. Hundreds of pages of newspapers and handfuls of letters, testimony, and court records show us a St. Catharines that in some ways is unrecognizable, and in other ways, show us that society still has a long way to go.

To experience the results of this research and to hear these stories, join us for the annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery, September 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, and 13. Tickets are now on sale.

For those interested in a informal bibliography, the source material used for scripting this year’s walks include:

• Letters and diary entries from the museum’s archival collection
• Summaries of convictions from police magistrates William Hamilton Merritt, Oliver Phelps, and Thomas Burns also held in the museum’s archival collection.
• Editions of the St. Catharines Constitutional, 1850-1870.
• Police Court Records for St. Catharines and the Niagara District.

Archives of Ontario. Series RG 22-134. Minutes of the Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery for the Province of Upper Canada.

Brown, Ron. Behind Bars: Inside Ontario’s Heritage Gaols. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2006.

Guillet, Edwin. Early Life in Upper Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1933.

Laws of Her Majesty’s Province of United Canada, passed in the year 1851. York: Stewart Derbishire and George Desbarts, 1851.

Nickerson, Janice. Crime and Punishment in Upper Canada. 2010: Dundurn Press and the Ontario Genealogical Society.

Roberts, Julia. “The Games People Played: Tavern Amusements and Colonial Social Relations.” Ontario History, 102(2), 2010. 154–174.

Adrian Petry is a public historian and Visitor Services Coordinator at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, and has researched, written, directed this year’s walks (along with many others).