Old Anglican Cemetery Municipal Heritage Site

The Old Anglican Cemetery has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of St. Paul’s because of its historic, aesthetic and spiritual values.

The Old Anglican Cemetery has historic value for its association with the community’s settlers, the majority of whom were members of the Church of England. Some of the first settlers were the Hutchings, Payne and Pittman families, who arrived in the 1880s-1890s after a lobster factory was established on the point at St. Paul’s. Theirs are amongst the family names recorded on extant gravemarkers at the Old Anglican Cemetery.

The cemetery also has historic value as one of the two oldest known cemeteries established at St. Paul’s. While the earliest death dates appearing on extant gravemarkers at the cemetery is 1903, the burial ground was likely in use before that time, and there are undoubtedly unmarked graves.

The cemetery has further historic value because its headstones contain historic and genealogical type information, and because they may be considered artifacts. Most of the gravemarkers record death dates between the 1920s and the 1970s, with one date of 1990, and the materials of the headstones coincide with these dates. The earlier headstones are marble in tablet forms, while some of the later ones are granite. There are also a number of white-painted, wooden cross gravemarkers in the grassy, fenced cemetery and several instances of low grave plot boundaries marked in wood or concrete.

The Old Anglican Cemetery has aesthetic value as a distinctive cultural landscape feature in the blend of natural and cultural landscape elements along St. Paul’s Heritage Trail.

The Old Anglican Cemetery has spiritual value due to its association with the Anglican religion in St. Paul’s.