The oldest cemetery in the village is the Waterdown or Union Cemetery, located at the eastern end of town in the area known as Vinegar Hill.

This is a municipal cemetery, open to all, dating from the earliest days of the settlement that became Waterdown.

Originally, the property was known as the Union Cemetery or Union Burying Ground, so named because the site was the location of a small meeting house used by members of the Episcopal Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church, who agreed to unite and share the cost of establishing and maintaining a cemetery for the village and surrounding township.

The arrival in Waterdown of the Griffin brothers, Absalom and Ebenezer, in the 1820s and the creation of a plan for the settlement that would become known as Waterdown in 1830 coincides with the opening of the property as a burial site – the earliest monument is for Mabel Robina Mitchell, aged one year, three months, three days, who died May 16, 1830.

Entry to the older section of the cemetery is through a handmade turnstile at the top of William Street. Here are buried the early families of the village, commemorated by dozens of thin white marble stones, sadly many of them broken through vandalism and with their inscriptions difficult to read.

On the east side of the central pathway and stretching across to Margaret Street are newer stones, mainly granite and with bold incised lettering. Most of the area’s long-time families, with names such as Griffin, McGregor, Creen and Slater, are buried here, many with large and elaborate monuments, (although the current monument to the Alexander Brown family is a replacement stone, with the original marble ones to Alexander and his wife Merren Grierson mounted on the wall of the Waterdown library).

The records of the Waterdown Cemetery Board that administered the property from 1877 to 1973 are contained in a series of books held by the Flamborough Archives and contain many interesting entries and comments about the operations of the property.

For example, November 1877 saw the price of a full lot raised to $2, while the price for a single lot was set at $1; in 1915, the ladies of the village were “thanked for the careful and painstaking way in which they had beautified the grounds.”

Sylvia Wray is the former archivist with the Flamborough Archives. She can be reached through the Archives at archives@flamboroughhistory.com.

This article was originally published in the Flamborough Review, 9 April 2015.