Richview Cemetery
Richview Cemetery's oldest surviving monument records the death of Ann Garbutt who was interred in 1846, before the official establishment of this burial site. In 1853, William Knaggs sold this land from his farm for "a chapel and lot without belonging to any particular church or denomination, to be respectively devoted exclusively to religious purposes in the discretion of certain trustees", namely Mark Dawson, Robert Coulter, and William Tuer. By 1850, the Union Chapel on the site had been joined by two other local congregations. The chapel and its cemetery served Richview, a small rural community bounded by present-day Dixon Road, Rathburn Road, Kipling Avenue, and Renforth Drive. Richview consisted of farms, a post office, blacksmith, church and school.
In 1888, William and Sarah Knaggs donated additional property, south of the cemetery, upon which a new building, depicted above, was constructed. It was named Richview Methodist Church (later Richview United Church). The vast development of Highway 427 led to the relocation of the congregation in 1959, the demolition of the church building, and the dramatic surroundings of the cemetery today. In the 1970s the McFarlane family cemetery and the Willow Grove Burying Ground were moved from their original sites and relocated here.
Richview Cemetery contains the graves of many of Etobicoke's founding families and their descendants, and remains today a rare surviving site within a now vanished rural community.
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.