Between about 1860 and World War I, second and third generation families began to commemorate the deceased on more elaborate forms of cemetery markers called monuments. The materials used still included marble, but granite began to gain popularity, as it allowed the monument maker more variety in design. Even small rural churchyards contain examples of obelisks and columns, topped with angels, funeral urns and grieving relatives, together with their multi sides that allowed for the recording of several family member’s names or even generations of a family to be included on a single stone.
For a brief period of about twenty years, from 1883 until 1900, another form of monument appeared to gain popularity, especially in the rural townships of Wentworth County. The White Bronze Monument Company of St. Thomas produced distinctive, rust resistant, weatherproof grey metal monuments, which when sanded and especially when wet, looked like granite. Most were produced in the form of obelisks, with each of the sides containing a variety of delicate and detailed cast reliefs and panels for customized inscriptions which could be added as required. These unique monument were sold through local franchised agents, but for some reason this method of purchasing a memorial never became popular and their production was short-lived.
About 1880, the block-like granite marker of the present day gradually began to gain favour, slowly replacing the previous marble markers, obelisks and columns and the new metal monuments that were being advertised as the latest style of cemetery memorial. By the 1880s, many of the affluent business men, entrepreneurs and politicians in the city and even prosperous farmers in the countryside were looking for ways to portray their success in life with monuments that would reflect their position in the community and remain standing long after their demise. The result was the use of larger and larger granite blocks serving as the single marker for a number of family plots together with individual foot stones and the construction of great stone vaults and even mausoleums in which family members were interred. Both became more and more prevalent in the 1880s and 1890s. In the Hamilton York Street Cemetery, a number of wealthy families used them to display their success. Some were truly spectacular structures, such as the model of a Greek temple for the Sanford family, and a neighbouring one too the Tuckett family. Many were box-shaped houses, of little architectural value, such as the McGregor-Ross Vault in the Union Cemetery, Waterdown, for these ostentatious structures appeared not only in the city cemetery but also in the country churchyard and burial grounds of the surrounding townships.
Sadly the massive granite monuments of the twentieth century seem to have lost all the individual character and pride which were so prominently recorded on the markers produced between 1830 and 1875. In the newer cemeteries and even in some of the old ones still open for burials, row upon row of granite monuments present themselves to the visitor, but now in the interest of brevity, mounting costs and an apparent horror that such monuments should sentimentalize the arrival of death – the vast majority have become little more than name plates. In some cases, the memorial consists only of a metal name plate, often bronze, attached to a small concrete marker lying flat on the ground.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 2005, 2024.
