Over 60 people visited the Mount Forest Cemetery Chapel when it was opened to the public as part of the Wellington North Doors Open on Sept. 23.
Family and friends used to gather in the chapel, which was built in 1947, on the cemetery grounds before a loved one was buried. In winter, when burials were not possible, caskets were stored in the lower area of the chapel.
“The last service was held here in 1967,” said Wellington North clerk Karren Wallace.
“Tastes have changed. There are now funeral homes that are air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter, and a lot of people have funeral services in churches now.”
Prior to 1947, most funeral services where held in the home of the deceased or his or her family.
Wallace has taken an interested in the chapel, and the Mount Forest Cemetery, since assuming the position of township clerk a few years ago.
This past summer a student was hired to input data about the cemetery and to research graves. Headstones are being photographed and the township is working with the Cultural Round Table, museum and historical society to learn more about the cemetery’s past.
There are an average of 45 to 50 burials a year; however in 1907 there were 111 burials, with 50 of them in November. All the graves were hand dug.
“There doesn’t seem to be any reason for so many deaths in that year and in that month,” Wallace said. “So we’re trying to check that out.”
The 14.5-acre Mount Forest Cemetery is actually located in the Township of Southgate. E.L Yeoman was the first individual buried in the cemetery, in the willow section. Two more burials happened three years later in the crystal section.
Over 7,000 plots/niches have been sold.
In addition to showcasing the little chapel with pews and the spot through which caskets were lowered to the basement, Wallace also showed visitors the basement itself, where to this day caskets are stored during winter months when it is impossible to dig a grave.
The wooden apparatus used to lower caskets from the chapel to the basement is no longer used, as caskets are now taken in through the basement door.
An old wooden wagon, which transported the caskets to the burial plots, is also stored in the basement, although now it is only used when cemetery staff are collecting spent plants from burial sites to be composted.
Wallace also pointed out two burlap sacks filled with salt that are used as a dehumidifier in the chapel basement.
“We forget about how things were done in the past,” she said. She pointed out the lock on the basement door – an iron bar wedged against the door and anchored in a divot in the cement floor.
“No one is ever going to break in,” she said.
The Mount Forest Cemetery Chapel was one of nine stops on the Doors Open Wellington North self-guided tour.
Also open to the public were the Mount Forest and Arthur Branches of the Wellington County Library, the Arthur and Area Historical Society and Mount Forest Museum and Archives, the Lynes blacksmith shop in Kenilworth, Quality Engineered Homes, St. John’s Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Mount Forest and Knox Conn Presbyterian Church.
