Julie Densham has big plans for her Hamilton backyard.
As she rooted around there, tossing out old twigs and weeds, she told Global News she planned to fill in a rectangular dirt patch there with a garden.
When she moved in, that patch housed an old, unused tin shed. She was not prepared for the surprise she found when she tore it down: A grave marker attributed to a 92-year-old woman.
“In loving memory of Annie Barton 1866-1958,” the marker said.
Densham said when she found it, it was upside down.
“It was a really, really heavy rock. It must weigh 200 pounds. So I flipped it over and the first thing I saw was ‘mother,’ and I’m a mom, so I liked it,” Densham said with a smile.
“And I noticed the ‘Annie Barton’ on there … And I was just really curious as to how did this marker get here and who was Annie Barton?”
While there is no indication of an association, the Barton name goes back a long way in Hamilton — which was once known as Barton Township.
Barton Street has long been one of the main routes in the lower city and there is a business district named Barton Village.
Densham said she was slightly worried about what she’d stumbled upon, but more intrigued.
“I love it,” she told Global News.
“I literally was going to come out with my Ouija board at midnight just for something fun to do.”
After putting a picture of the tombstone on a local Facebook group, fellow residents and City of Hamilton staff were able to provide Densham with a little more information and assure her that there was not a body buried in her backyard. It turns out the stone was a spare marker left over by Annie Barton’s family, who used to own the property.
“Annie Barton’s marker was changed. They had to alter it (after Barton’s daughter died and was buried beside her) … And so because you pay for that marker, (her family) were given the option of bringing that marker home, which they did,” she explained.
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“The great-great-grandson of Annie Barton emailed me and told me that he remembers that marker being there and upside down. He remembers playing in that sort of area. So they all have memories, they all knew it was there, it wasn’t creepy to them. But we didn’t know this … Annie is buried at Woodland Cemetery with her fresh marker.”
Jim Boyko, Barton’s great-great-grandson, said he plans to pick the marker up from Julie on Friday. He said it was left in that spot for years and that he simply forgot to take it with him when he moved out in 2010.
After having, in a way, shared a space with Annie Barton for the last year-and-a-half, Densham said her curiousity is piqued. She said she still plans to learn a little bit more about exactly who Barton was.
Meanwhile, a couple amateur genealogists have reached out to her over social media pledging to help her look into it.
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