Hanlan's Corner Cemetery

A small, easy-to-miss pioneer cemetery on Derry Road in the north of the city, marooned between warehouses and the perimeter of Pearson airport. The stones — many of them weathered to the point of being illegible — record the families that farmed this land in the 19th century before Mississauga as a city even existed.

There is no entrance gate and no information panel. The Mississauga Heritage Foundation maintains the site, and it is locked behind a chain-link fence, but you can see most of it from the roadside. It is a particularly quiet kind of monument.

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The cemetery is all that remains of the vanished 19th-century village of Hanlan's Corners, swallowed up first by Pearson airport expansion and then by warehouse sprawl in the 1960s. Around 100 stones survive, the oldest from the 1830s, set under a stand of cedars between a major truck route and a row of distribution centres.

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