New life among the tombstones
‘Some people have a rose garden. I have a cemetery’
Dianne and Barry Munro didn’t just buy a house eight years ago.
They bought the cemetery that came with it, too.
“It didn’t bother us, because it’s pioneer history and a piece of local history. We thought, well, this is kind of cool,” said Dianne.
“Some people have a rose garden. I have a cemetery.”
The old Lapp family cemetery is a small piece of the two-acre property they bought on Detenbeck Road in rural Niagara Falls, a stone’s throw from the Niagara River.
It’s not remote, just hard to find.
The former owner had built a picket fence around the 15 graves there but otherwise left it untended. The grass grew tall, the stones mostly fell and the bases they sat on sank into the ground.
People told the Munros to throw some dirt and grass seed over the ground and no one would ever know the graves were there.
“It’s true. Nobody ever would have known,” said Dianne.
“But we felt this is a piece of history. Not our personal history, but a piece of history we thought was valuable to keep.”
In June, they were honoured for the work they did restoring the cemetery by the Ontario Historical Society, at a Toronto event.
It’s recognition not just for the respect the Munros showed the graves, but for the heavy lifting and dirty work it takes to bring a 200-year-old cemetery back to life.
After they moved in, cemetery restoration sat on their to-do list for three years until Dianne learned a friend’s son needed to complete his 40 hours of community service to graduate high school.
That brought William Todd, a Stamford Collegiate student, into the picture. He and Barry dug in, literally, cutting the grass, lifting the headstones and using a wooden lever to pry some of the bases out of the ground again.
“He came out and helped me, he slugged and lugged and cleaned,” said Barry. “So that kind of forced me to get going, because it had to be in that time frame (for him to graduate) … and he spent well over 100 hours on it.”
Cemetery restoration is never really complete. There’s always more work to be done. Next they’d like to enhance the gardening, to make it a sort of sanctuary to attract bees and butterflies.
Both Dianne and Barry are members of the Willoughby Historical Society, and they obtained a map showing the 15 graves on site. There are actually 16 people buried there, with a mother and child interred together.
The limestone markers were in good shape, generally, but in need of cleaning, which led the Munros to research online ways to safely restore old monuments.
Also, a few of the headstones had broken over the years.
Dianne said Mayor Jim Diodati learned of their work and got the city’s cemeteries manager, Mark Richardson, to look into it.
Richardson had city staff help them to repair the stones, and now, after seeing what the Munros did with their cemetery the city has taken a more active role in maintaining other old, forgotten pioneer cemeteries — a move they credit Richardson with spurring.
It’s the Lapp family cemetery, but there are two other names on the headstones, Sayler and Hershey. Through research they’ve found the family, led by brothers Isaac and Abraham, were Pennsylvania Dutch United Empire Loyalists.
All the adults, men and women, were listed on the census of the day as evangelical Pentecostal preachers. The oldest grave there is from 1805, the most recent is 1895.
Since the cemetery was restored, some of the family members have dropped by to visit their ancestors’ resting place.
Owning a cemetery isn’t for everyone, but the Munros said they aren’t superstitious.
They did have a woman call out of the blue, though, who said she was a hypnotist with the ability to commune with the dead. Because the restoration work had disturbed the graves, she wanted to visit to make sure everyone was all right.
So they invited her over.
And the spirits are all good, she said.