Dealing with the inevitable — Victoria Lawn Cemetery

The first cemetery in St. Catharines was established immediately adjacent to the community’s first church, about where the statue of William Hamilton Merritt is today, across from the CKTB building.

That cemetery covered much of the area adjacent to the section of St. Paul Street West between Ontario Street and the Burgoyne Bridge.

In the mid-1830s, the church congregation purchased property on Church Street and began construction of what is today St. George’s Anglican Church. In 1837, the church authorities urged all those with loved ones buried at the original church cemetery to remove those remains, either to a new cemetery established at the rear of the St. George’s property or to other sites of their choosing.

By this time three of the other churches in the village — the Methodist, the Catholic and one of the Presbyterian churches — all had graveyards adjacent to their churches. However, as the population of the village steadily increased some people began to feel that for reasons of public health those graveyards in the village centre needed to be replaced.

In 1850, a group of local citizens proposed to the mayor and town council that a committee be established to assess the existing sectarian graveyards and search for a site for a public cemetery away from the town centre.

In 1855, the town purchased a 9.3hectare tract on the south side of Queenston Street, five kilometeres outside of the town limits, for the new municipal cemetery. The first burial plots were put up for sale there in mid-1856. The first burials — including remains transferred from the existing church cemeteries downtown — took place later that same year.

Our old photo this week shows the entrance to the new cemetery sometime early in the last century — sometime after 1897, to be sure. It was in that year that the original name, simply St. Catharines City Cemetery, was changed to Victoria Lawn Cemetery as part of the city’s celebration of the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria.

As the decades passed there were further notable changes made to the institution.

In 1922, the cemetery was greatly expanded with the purchase of land — dubbed the New Cemetery — on the opposite (north) side of Queenston Street. Later acquisitions of land in stages expanded the cemetery to the 69 hectares it includes today, with more than 69,000 burials and 30,000 memorial stones, large and small.

In 1916, a mausoleum building was added, allowing for above ground interments. In that same year the original wood and wire entrance gate was replaced by the stone pillars we see there today. Seven years later they were replicated across Queenston Street at the entrance to the new cemetery. In 1950, the 9.1metre-tall Davella Mills Memorial carillon tower was dedicated near the entrance to the new cemetery.

At intervals changes were also made to the original cemetery superintendent’s residence and office adjacent to the original cemetery entrance.

Today, the function of that old administration building has been taken over by a modern office building at 431 Queenston St. Meanwhile, the original building remains, awaiting its fate.