Some grave concerns tended by volunteers
Municipal staff, volunteers provide upkeep for abandoned graveyards
Ken Conway is a good soul volunteering as a gravekeeper at a cemetery owned by City of Ottawa taxpayers.
Landon Cemetery at 6279 Carp Rd. is one of those classic roadside burial grounds; if motorists blink, they’ll miss it.
For almost 20 years, Conway has been hauling his lawn mower up a hill to the elevated burial ground to give the property a quick trim. The rain this past summer meant he sometimes visited twice a week.
The retired Nortel equipment installer, who lives six minutes away in Fitzroy Harbour, isn’t related to anyone buried at the cemetery, and he receives no money from city hall for the maintenance work.
“Nobody asked me to,” Conway said. “I just like doing it, that’s all.”
It was at some point after the 1998 ice storm that Conway decided to take it upon himself to clean up the cemetery.
Then, one day when Conway stopped by for his cleanup ritual, he was startled to find the work already done.
“Who the heck is cutting my cemetery?” Conway wondered.
After he realized it was the city, he signed up to be part of the “adopt” program that has volunteers take care of city property, such as parks and roads. From time to time he signs a waiver clearing the city of liability. For the effort, Conway gets his name on a sign at the cemetery.
Here’s a little known fact: City of Ottawa taxpayers are the owners of 16 cemeteries scattered across the municipality and they have no say in how many more they’ll accumulate.
That’s because under provincial law, the municipality is the owner of last resort when a cemetery is abandoned.
Each of those cemeteries comes with an annual cost, since the city becomes its keeper. Workers cut the grass, trim the edges and perform minor repairs.
It’s a small hit to the budget. In 2016, the city paid $15,461.60 to take care of all 16 cemeteries.
Laila Gibbons, the city’s director of parks, forestry and stormwater services, said there are no records on the number of people buried at each cemetery.
According to Gibbons, the cemeteries aren’t available for new burials.
Many are old cemeteries with fading grave markers, and some, like the Landon Cemetery, are tiny.
A former United Church graveyard on Donnelly Road, west of Kemptville, is only about 12 paces wide and 30 paces deep. A rusted metal fence marks the border of the cemetery. Many of the tombstones have been reinforced with metal bars so they don’t topple.
Other cemeteries are hidden from the road.
A cemetery off Craighurst Drive in North Gower is along a grassy path, tucked behind three homes and enveloped by trees and a fence. The secluded location might be a ghoulish hangout; on one recent visit, there was an empty bottle of spiced rum, some pop cans, a chip bag, plastic baggies and a lighter strewn under a tree against the fence.
Old, abandoned cemeteries simply become green spaces in the community after the gravediggers hang up their shovels for good.
Gravestones are piled in the tree line of a grassy patch of land near the western end of Rideau Road. It’s a collection of collapsed markers that once dotted this former Protestant cemetery.
It’s about the right size for a community park if the weathered tombstones weren’t there, but even though it’s not recreation space, it still cost the city a couple thousand dollars last year for regular maintenance.
On a warm October day, Martin Stone was on a riding lawn mower across the lane from the cemetery, cutting the grass around his home. The city is good at taking care of the cemetery grounds, said Stone, who moved to the neighbourhood in 1990.
Any hesitancy to moving across from a cemetery?
“The thing is, it’s quiet,” Stone said. “There’s nothing there.”
The closest city-owned cemetery to the central area is at the Billings Estate on Cabot Street, near Riverside Drive and Bank Street. The city says it’s one of Ottawa’s oldest community cemeteries. Graves date back to the 1820s.
The 15 other cemeteries are located in suburban and rural Ottawa.
In Claudette Cain Park along the east side of the Rideau River, near the Vimy Memorial Bridge, a small square cemetery is separated from the rest of the green space by a black fence.
The Moodie cemetery might be the most unusual since it’s embedded in a city park. It’s an odd landmark to come across on the multiuse path that snakes through the park, not far from a playground.
The city proposes to name the cemetery Moodie Family Cemetery. James Moodie, who immigrated from Scotland to the Ottawa area in 1840, bought land for a farm and a cemetery. The cemetery has been informally referred to as the Moodie cemetery in the community, so a council approval of the naming proposal later this year would make it official.
The city can’t break out how much it spends on the Moodie cemetery because its upkeep costs are rolled into the park’s expenses.
In some cases, there is a unique relationship between the city and the folks who take care of their local cemetery.
At the northern end of Dunrobin Road, the gravel Baird Grant Lane shoots off to the east and the visitor is met with a large sign for Torbolton Cemetery. “Established Dec. 13, 1869,” the sign says.
It’s in a two-acre forest clearing, and although there are tombstones dating back to the 1880s, there are several graves of people buried in recent years. There are plots that have been reserved, judging by the blank spaces for death dates on tombstones, making the cemetery a particularly curious case.
While the city said there are no more burials at the cemeteries it owns, Bruce Penney said there was one at Torbolton Cemetery as early as three weeks ago.
Penney, 66, and other local families take care of the grounds, which explains why the city didn’t spend a cent on the upkeep in 2016. He’s the one who digs the graves, as long as the funeral home shows a death certificate. The city knows about the arrangement, he said.
It must have been around municipal amalgamation in 2001 that the cemetery became city property, Penney said, but the volunteer families are perfectly happy with being in charge of its operations without the city’s interference.
“We’ve run it very successfully for the last 100 years or so,” said Penney, who estimated that 20 to 30 members of his family are buried there.
“If the city takes over, then everything it going to turn into a quagmire.”