What remains: Buried secrets on the University of Manitoba campus

A simple stone cairn in front of one of the University of Manitoba's grand buildings, passed daily by thousands of students, contains a little-known secret.

Inside the base of the Tyndall stone monument are the remains of Prof. Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, known as one of the university's original six professors and for whom the Buller Biological Laboratories building is named.

That makes the cairn more of a tombstone.

"I think it would change the way people interact with that section of the campus [if they knew], for sure.… It's a very odd thing to kind of think about," said Jaron Rykiss, president of the University of Manitoba Students' Union.

"I personally wasn't aware of it … to be honest with you."

That's likely the case for most of the 30,000 students at the U of M's Fort Garry campus in south Winnipeg, said Heather Bidzinski, head of archives and special collections at the university.

"The monument that the cremains are interred in is fairly nondescript. I would be very surprised if people understood that they were actually passing by Buller himself," she said.

Born in England in 1874, Buller was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham when he was lured in 1904 to Winnipeg, a small Prairie city on the cusp of a population boom. The city grew from 42,500 people in 1901 to 136,000 in 1911.

It was a time of evolution for the U of M as well. Established in 1877 as the first institution of higher education in Western Canada, it initially primarily served as a degree-granting body for its three founding theological colleges: St. Boniface College, St. John's College and Manitoba College.

The provincial government changed the University Act in 1901 so the U of M could do its own teaching in a brand new three-storey brick structure on Broadway, a site that today is Memorial Park, across from the legislative building.

At the start, instructors were still members of the clergy, connected to the founding colleges.

The hiring in 1904 of Buller and five others — Frank Allen, Gordon Bell, Robert Rutherford Cochrane, Matthew Archibald Parker and Swale Vincent — established the faculty of science and marked the first generation of "professional professors," Bidzinski said.

Known as the original six, they were the first instructors whose sole job was to research and teach, she said.

"When Buller [and the others were] originally hired there was really no leadership. There wasn't a president of the university. It was still fairly new," Bidzinski said.

The U of M hired its first president, James MacLean, in 1913, and he and Buller forged a strong friendship.

A botanist who specialized in mycology, the study of fungus, Buller was given a lot of leash for study and brought of prestige to the school through new discoveries and appointments, including as president of the Royal Society of Canada.

He also was one of the founders, in 1925, of the federally run Dominion Rust Research Laboratory, located in the Agriculture Canada building on the U of M campus, for scientists working to combat crop diseases. It was created in response to the problem of stem rust fungus plaguing Prairie wheat crops.

In a 2004 article for the Manitoba Historical Society, Buller was described as the most distinguished scientist among the original six and perhaps the most esteemed in the university's history.

In the 1930s, the university moved to its present site and a grand Gothic-style building, later renamed the Buller Building, was built for the sciences.

Buller's relationship with the U of M, however, ended on a negative note a short time later.

A financial scandal hit the university just after the move, and a royal commission led to the replacement of the president, chancellor and board of governors.

Buller's relationship with the new president wasn't great and he gave up teaching in 1936 but continued to use his old Broadway campus office for research projects. In 1942, though, he was told to make way for new instructors.

"Buller felt really neglected and was quite upset after contributing his life work to the university and really helping to build the foundation," Bidzinksi said.

He hauled his materials — research materials, an extensive library, hand-coloured illustrations, glass slides — to an old laboratory and piled them up, where they sat for years.

Buller's health deteriorated and in 1944, he was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. He died July 3 of that year at age 69.

Bidzinski said apparently on his deathbed, Buller told colleagues he did not want the university to keep his materials, so the items were given to the Dominion Rust lab (later renamed the Cereal Research Centre).

The Buller Memorial Library was established in the Cereal Research Centre, where his remains were set into a hollow compartment in a wall, below his portrait.

Buller had no family and "his colleagues felt that his proper resting place was with his treasured library," Bidzinski said.

The research centre was shut down by the federal government in 2014, but the U of M had started acquiring the Buller collection about a decade before that — despite his deathbed wish, which was not in his will.

So Buller's materials, and remains, went back to the university. 

Recognizing the shelves in the U of M archives probably weren't the best place for the remains, a decision was made to set Buller's copper urn to rest in front of the building bearing his name.

"It's an interesting piece of history. I mean, obviously when you have a university that's been around as long as we have, there are bound to be some quirks like that," Rykiss said.

"But it definitely paints a more vivid picture of what happens on this campus."

Not the only ones

If Buller's remains being buried on campus isn't odd enough, how about the fact they aren't the only ones?

"The man who proposed the Avenue of Elms, to honour the soldiers killed in the First World War … is buried underneath the first elm opposite the Administration Building," said Shelley Sweeney, former head of archives and special collections at the U of M.

In 1922, the main road into the Fort Garry campus was dedicated as a living memorial to members of the U of M community who never returned from the First World War. The Avenue of Elms runs from the admin building to Pembina Highway along Chancellor Matheson Drive.

A plaque at the base of that first tree is inscribed in memoriam to Wilfrid John Rae (1899-1979), "whose cremated remains are buried under the elm tree he planted in 1923."