The countryside of Wellington County is dotted with dozens of old cemeteries. Most are no longer used and inactive.
Some are well maintained, while others have had their surviving tombstones gathered into a single monument. A few are totally abandoned.
There are still a few rural cemeteries that are active and well maintained. Among them is the Johnson Cemetery, at Lot 20, Concession 2 of the former Eramosa township, a short distance east of Barrie Hill Church.
That cemetery, like most of the active rural burial grounds, has its own cemetery board. The one for the Johnson Cemetery currently consists of a president, vice president, secretary-treasurer, operations manager, and 11 other members, drawn from the families who own plots at the cemetery.
Johnson Cemetery dates back 137 years. On May 17 of 1873, a group of residents, after much private discussion, met at Barrie Hill Church to establish a cemetery. The result was the formation of a committee, with instructions to negotiate with local farmer John Johnson for the purchase of a plot of land.
The meeting gave the committee two weeks, and was then to report to another meeting on May 31, at the new schoolhouse for School Section 3. Johnson had sold the land for that school two years earlier and it was across the road from the land preferred by the committee for the new cemetery.
For a two-acre plot, John Johnson asked $300, a price that was acceptable to those present. Since the initial meeting, many local people had signed up to purchase plots in the cemetery, even though it had not been formally organized or laid out. A total of 54 had signed up by then, and they constituted the shareholders of the new cemetery. Each share entitled them to a plot for $20. Some families paid for multiple plots. Each plot would consist of 200 square feet, with a nominal capacity of four graves.
Before adjourning, the meeting decided to organize formally as the Union Cemetery Company of the Township of Eramosa. They also engaged T.W. Cooper to lay out the cemetery, and Matt Leatham to put up a fence around it over the summer.
The shareholders met again on Aug. 9. The first order of business was the election of an executive. Nine men constituted the original board. Those present elected James Loghrin as their interim president and secretary.
By then, Leatham had the fence put up, at a cost of $197, and Cooper had completed his survey and submitted his bill for $50. The meeting authorized those payments. Cooper’s plan divided the land into quarters, each with 76 plots. In the centre he outlined a place for a round flower bed. There was a carriage drive around the perimeter of the land, just inside the fence. There were two additional driveways from front to back, and pathways every second plot.
Each of the quarters held 76 plots, with a capacity of four graves each. That gave the cemetery a theoretical maximum capacity of 1,216 graves. Individual plots were arranged in a two-by-two format, so that a family might place a single monument in the centre of the plot to mark all four graves. Legal work, then as now, plodded along at a glacial pace. The cemetery did not get its deed to the property registered until Dec. 3, 1873.
To look after the needs of the poor and indigent, the board allocated some of the plots on the east side of the cemetery to those unable to pay for a plot.
The cemetery’s shareholders confirmed James Loghrin as president at the 1874 annual meeting. He would hold the position until 1883. His successor, John Armstrong, served for another 15 years.
Johnson Cemetery gained a more permanent appearance in 1874, when the directors authorized the construction of a stone fence and a gate across the front of the property. Robert Lamb secured the contract, at a price of $453.
That was a sizable expenditure for the cemetery company, and shows that income from the sale of plots had come in steadily over the first year.
The next major improvement was the planting of a number of trees and shrubs in 1878, according to suggestions made by T.W. Cooper accompanying his original survey.
The landscaping of cemeteries was taken seriously in the late 19th century. Ideas that were later applied to public parks had their origins in cemetery landscaping. For many people, a visit to a cemetery was the highlight of a Sunday outing, and often involved enjoying a picnic lunch among the graves.
That first planting of 1878 was less than a success. Most of the trees did not survive into the following year. Later attempts were more successful, and included a number of evergreen trees, along with more maple trees and some hedging. Unfortunately, it does not appear that any photographs of the cemetery from those years have survived, so it is difficult to imagine what the cemetery looked like after the initial efforts at landscaping.
Plots continued to sell, though at a slower rate, into the 20th century. In 1911, faced with a dwindling supply of available plots, the directors decided to expand the cemetery. The Johnson Estate (John Johnson had passed away in the interim) agreed to sell an additional acre of land at a price of $100.
The new space, to the west of the original cemetery, provided an additional 152 plots, each, like the original plots, with space for four graves. The following year the directors let a contract to extend the stone fence across the front of the additional land, at a cost of $157.
After some of the founding families had died out or moved away, much knowledge of the burials in the cemetery was lost. The cemetery’s records indicated the purchasers of the plots, but there were no official records of who was actually buried in them, when they were buried, or in which part of the plot they rested for eternity. In many cases a tombstone recorded the information, but not every grave had a tombstone, and some plots had a single stone, which did not indicate which areas of a plot were vacant. Records in more recent decades are much more complete.
By the late 20th century the need for the older missing information became more acute, with the rapid growth of interest in genealogy.
During the 1990s, several volunteers spent hundreds of hours scouring records and newspapers in an attempt to compile a list of all burials at Johnson Cemetery.
Those results were published in 1997 in a booklet issued for the memorial service that June. The booklet lists all known burials up to that time, and the plot where the graves are located. It immediately became the key document for the history of the cemetery.
Burials have continued at Johnson Cemetery into the 21st century, many of people from the pioneer families of that area of old Eramosa Township.
The special memorial service this year is scheduled for June 20. Other rural Wellington County cemeteries are holding memorial services in the near future, among them the Crown Cemetery in Puslinch, on June 27.
But the histories of those cemeteries are stories for another time.