The parking lot of the Don Jail isn't the only place in downtown Toronto where with a pick and shovel you can probably dig up a few old bones.

For the better part of 30 years, what is now Yorkville was Toronto's first public non-denominational cemetery, known to the town as the Potter's Field. In 1825, it started off as 2.4 hectares west of Yonge St. and north of Bloor St., gradually expanded and by 1855 some 6,700 people were buried there.

It's a good guess that under the office towers along Bloor and the boutiques and fancy restaurants on Cumberland Ave. there are plenty of early settlers still resting peacefully.

The first person buried there was an infant and many of those that followed were victims of typhoid, cholera and diphtheria, diseases that ravaged the city during the early part of the 19th century before the advent of basic sanitation and clean water.

The cemetery was closed because the city had grown around it. Families had 25 years to remove remains and re-inter them at the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. But given the size of the job, the cost and the time that had passed since the original burials, it is certain a good many were left where they lay.

How many were moved before the land was sold for development is unclear. Estimates range between 600 and 1,000. The one certain thing, says Carl Benn, chief curator of the city's museums and heritage services, is "they were bound to miss a few."

St. James Cemetery, southeast of Parliament and Bloor Sts., was laid out with winding lanes and shady trees including willows and hemlocks, but the Strangers Burial Ground, as it was properly called, was for the poor and those of modest means. It was laid out in a simple grid stretching west and north.

For a time, two of the most famous people interred there were blacksmith Samuel Lount and farmer Peter Matthews, loyal supporters of former Toronto mayor William Lyon Mackenzie, who led the Rebellion of 1837. The pair were hanged for treason in 1838, buried and later moved to the Toronto Necropolis on Winchester St., east of Parliament St.

Lount and Matthews were hanged in full view of thousands at Toronto's second jail, a place where there are probably more bodies underfoot. The facility at King and Toronto Streets would have been kitty-corner to the King Edward Hotel.

That jail was the second to be built in York and was a substantial two-storey brick affair. The prison faced Toronto St., was set back about 9 metres and surrounded on three sides by a picket fence 4.5 metres tall. A court was built on nearby Courtyard Square.

While Lount and Matthews received a proper burial, many of those hanged at the jail between 1824 and 1840 would have been interred in a corner of the yard with much less fanfare. That was the case with the remains found recently under a parking lot outside the Don Jail in the Gerrard St. E. and Broadview Ave. area.

The men were found during an archeological assessment and were individually buried under what had once been the exercise yard.

The Toronto St. jail later became a lunatic asylum and Benn says it is possible there are bodies underneath what are now office buildings. But he says it is fanciful to think there are many graves there. While the law in the early 1800s carried the death penalty for many crimes, the sentence was rarely carried out.

"There's an image of the Georgians hanging people with a gay delight, but it really wasn't the case."

Still for many people in that area or strolling in the area of through Yorkville, when they go to work every day, they really are whistling past the graveyard.