Thornton Cemetery, known locally as “the cemetery with the pond,” has been serving the City of Oshawa, the town of Whitby and neighbouring communities since 1984. The pond, large flowerbeds and numerous birdhouses and feeding stations, enhance Thornton’s park-like setting. Ongoing development of the landscape will preserve the natural character of the rolling countryside. 

The architecture and building materials of the cemetery’s office, chapel, crematorium and mausoleum reflect the rural and religious buildings of Oshawa’s history. The warm red brick of the buildings, for example, is found in many Ontario farm homes, and the chapel features stained-glass works of art.

Thornton’s services and features include:

• A full range of interment choices providing for ground burial, cremation and mausoleum entombment;
• Veterans’ section

Thornton’s broad selection of ground-burial options include:

• Single graves, which can accommodate two caskets
  plus cremated remains and permit a flat marker;
• Single graves adjacent to a brick wall, on which a
  marker can be placed;
• Single graves that permit an upright monument;
• Larger lots of two or more graves that permit an upright monument.

This choice, which provides for above-ground burial, involves placing a casket inside a crypt, which is then sealed.

There is still limited space in Thornton’s mausoleum, an outdoor structure in a garden-court design that allows for inscriptions on the granite crypt fronts.

The veterans’ section, dedicated to Canadian and Allied
veterans and their spouses, is distinguished by a memorial
in the form of a polished granite pyramid set atop a base
of rough-hewn granite.

In recognition of veterans’ service to their country, the
costs of interment rights in this section are reduced.

Increasingly chosen as an option in the commemorative process, cremation is simply one method of preparing remains for final disposition. Many who choose cremation will also want a lasting memorial, and a place for family and friends to go to pay tribute and remember. Often chosen as a final resting place is a columbarium, which is an arrangement of niches containing cremation urns. For those who choose cremation, Thornton offers:

• Two indoor chapel columbariums, one with wood-fronted niches and the other glass-fronted;
• An outdoor granite columbarium with overhead trellises, where colourful flower baskets hang in the summer months;
• Urn spaces adjacent to walls on which bronze markers may be placed;
• Alternatively, cremated remains can be scattered in one of the memorial scattering areas.