Side-by-side, two cemeteries have endured for two centuries
Change is coming to a place that hardly changes, as adjacent cemeteries open up to new demographics
KITCHENER — A birth in a cemetery. Bill Tilt saw it with his 67-year-old eyes.
“This year,” said Tilt, grass-cutting caretaker of the 200-year-old Doon Presbyterian Cemetery on a cleared bank of well-wooded Mill Park Drive.
“I saw a doe having her two fawns.” The sight was near and deer to him. He witnessed the delivery just across a lower laneway, dotted with an honour guard of knotty pines and twisty maples, in the neighbouring Kinzie-Biehn cemetery.
Twin deer born in side-by-side settler cemeteries, both two centuries old on a pair of plots maybe 100 paces wide and 400 paces deep.
Life begins amid a thousand granite-punctuated endings.
“I don’t think anything too exciting happens out in a cemetery,” Tilt said.
Maybe. A seven-foot burgundy granite monument was put up by the Wright family this year. Still, business is, uh, dying. It’s always dying.
Tilt, hasn’t shovel-dug a deep casket grave at the Doon cemetery, owned by the nearby Presbyterian Church, for at least two years. That’s four hours of spadework. Cremation burials — just one in each of the last two years — require a shallower effort.
“Some years there’s no burials. Some years, there’s maybe five or so,” Tilt said. “It’s been a poor business year.”
But there was a cemetery birthday celebration. Church members prayed and wore carnations a few weeks ago to mark 200 years since the first burial on the Doon grounds. Family members of resting cemetery residents placed the carnations on the gravestones.
Tilt’s parents and grandparents are buried here. Their parents and grandparents are buried at Blair cemetery, the oldest in the region.
But Homer Watson, landscape painter and eponymous boulevard beyond the cemetery’s back fence, rests on the grounds Tilt tends.
Woods and a trail to the front gate’s left. A sister cemetery pushed up against townhouse backyards to the right. All tucked into one corner of what was once a 19th-century farm, part of which was donated to the Presbyterian Church.
This volunteer caretaker job? Tilt used to help his dad and uncle keep the grounds and dig sandy graves when he was a kid. When he retired from the forestry branch of the government, former caretaker Charlie Plumtree asked him to take over. He accepted. From failing hands the shovel was thrown 15 tree-trimming years ago.
“If there’d be somebody willing to take it over, I would give it up,” Tilt said, lamenting the cemetery’s decline as an important spiritual hub and final destination in modern life.
“It’s more of a historical place now, I would think.”
But there is room for more people to be buried here in these two cemeteries. Anybody, perhaps. Not just Presbyterians and local natives and descendants of wagon-riding settlers from Pennsylvania.
“We’re looking at opening it up.” said 70-year-old Glen Ueberschlag, the church member in charge of sales and record-keeping at the Doon cemetery. “Because a number of cemeteries are full right now.”
And there is open space for 300 at Doon, Ueberschlag estimates. There could be another 200-300 resting places at Kinzie-Biehn.
“So we’re thinking of offering something to the public in general,” said Ueberschlag, who has relatives — including a murdered cousin — buried at Doon. “To bring some more revenue to the church as well.”
Change is coming to a place that hardly changes. Ueberschlag is sure of it.
“When we do open this thing up, it’s going to change quite a bit because our pricing is three times lower than anyone else in the city,” he said.
Elsewhere in the city, he says, single plots go for $2,000 or more. A single plot at Doon Presbyterian is about $550.
“We’ve tried to keep it that way because it was given to the Presbyterian Church,” Ueberschlag said. “When we open it up, it’ll be (to) who ever wants to. Times have changed.”
There is also serious talk of cemetery amalgamation.
Doon could take over KinzieBiehn, where Larry Kinzie of Cambridge has been grave-digging caretaker — his sons now help with the shovel-work — since 1975.
“They’re the ones that are negotiating with me,” said Kinzie, an 82-year-old descendant of settler Dilman Kinzie who only gave up playing hockey three times a week last April.
“Otherwise, it would just be put back to the city. But the city doesn’t really want it. It’s too small for them.”
Kinzie insists he isn’t really the cemetery owner, anyway. There used to be an association with a president. But they’re all dead now, he said. So the government sends everything to him.
“I don’t own it,” said Kinzie, who says Kinzie-Biehn is the older of the two cemeteries. “We do have the deed for the front part of the property.”
Both cemeteries boast newer sections at Doon, the new part opened in 1926. At Kinzie-Biehn, it goes back to 1934.
Things are different now. There are homes behind the woods behind the cemeteries. Beyond those are high rises and a strip mall.
Kinzie recalls talking to his dad, Gord, as they stood on the cemetery property in 1971. Development around Homer Waterson Boulevard had just begun. His father, then caretaker, eyed a burial plot.
“Oh, boy, I hope I’m in here before this happens,” his dad said.
Later that year, his father died. Not a funny story. It just happened, Kinzie said. The future of these two joined-at-the-hip cemeteries will just happen, too. Memories will be buried. Fawns will wander away.
“The cemetery situation, it won’t last much longer the way things are progressing,” Tilt said. “People nowadays, their values have changed.”