Description

CEM 158_carlisle_anglican_church_cemetery

Other Known Names: St. Paul’s Anglican Church Cemetery

Street Address:        South Side of 9th Concession Road, West of Parkshore Place

Location: Lot 7, Concession 8 East Flamborough Township

Type of Cemetery: Religious (New Connection Wesleyan Methodist, Anglican), Abandoned

Responsible Agency: City of Hamilton

Status for Burials: Closed for burials       Plot Plan: None

Size:         Small, 3 monuments known to exist

Fencing: It is to the side of a new house, with open sections Monument Types:              None left

Monuments of: Marble (Those found in 1987)

Date of Opening: 1863

History:

In November 1858, a small plot of land was sold to a group of Canadian Wesleyan New Connexion Methodists in the Carlisle area. The group built a frame chapel and established a Methodist burying ground. In October 1870, the Methodist Trustees placed a notice in Milton’s “Canadian Champion” newspaper, advertising the property, including buildings and a cemetery to be auctioned on 3 November at the chapel doorway.

A group of local Anglicans purchased the property for $350 at the auction for use as their church. Named St. Paul’s Anglican Church, it functioned from 1870 until about 1884, when it was closed due to the lack of a congregation. The buildings on the site were gradually removed, the chapel and drive shed purchased by members of the Carlisle community. It is believed that at this time there were approximately 20-30 stones at the site, the majority from the period of Methodist ownership. Over time the cemetery became neglected and the property surrounding it was purchased, eventually owned by the Arthur Beaumont family.

By the 1980s the site was only vaguely remembered by longtime residents, among them Mr. Jack Bennett who urged that the site be properly marked and respected. In 1987, a group of local residents surveyed the former site looking for evidence of a burial ground. Three monuments were found on the site, together with a number of stone holders, the other stones having disappeared during the previous decades. The cemetery is now managed by the City of Hamilton.

The earliest burying grounds in Flamborough were often located on farm properties due to the distance from an established cemetery in the area. The records of burials at such sites are now lost as properties changed hands and families left the area.

Abandoned cemeteries created by early church congregations also lack such records and are often unknown to local residents when almost all the signs, such as buildings and monuments, have since disappeared from sight, such an abandoned cemetery exists on the outskirts of Carlisle village.

Located on Lot 6, Concession 8 of the former township of East Flamborough, the pioneer Methodist and Anglican cemetery can only be accessed from Carlisle Road. The original deed to the cemetery property dates from Nov. 5, 1858, when the trustees of the Chapel of the Canadian Wesleyan New Connexion Church purchased a quarter of an acre from Andrew Patton for £12.10s. A chapel or meeting house was built at the front of the property, reputedly a white frame structure with a small steeple. At the rear of the building stood a drive shed and an area that served as a cemetery.

The small congregation was one of a number of denominations or branches within the Methodist Church that existed from the 1840s to 1870s, mainly as a result of minor differences over doctrine. As the various sects of the church were reunited during the 1870s, the Carlisle chapel became redundant; the Wesleyan Methodist Church on Centre Road absorbed them again to become the only Methodist Church in the central area of the township.

The trustees of the Chapel of the Canadian Wesleyan New Connexion Methodist Church advertised the building for sale in the Canadian Champion, a Milton newspaper, in October and the first week of November, 1870. When no buyers came forward, the property and building went to a public auction conducted outside the church door on Nov. 7, 1870. The only bid appears to have been made by members of the small Anglican community in the Carlisle area who had no building in which to worship so travelled to Waterdown for services. The members, in the name of the Toronto Diocese of the Anglican Church, paid $350 for the buildings and burial ground and immediately renamed the chapel St. Paul’s Anglican Church.

Following their purchase of the small wooden Methodist chapel located on Lot 6, Concession 8, the Carlisle area Anglican congregation renamed the building St. Paul’s Anglican Church. However, the congregation appears to have existed for only about 15 years, and was probably served by an itinerant minister. Toronto Diocese records show that the church was on a circuit that included Lowville and Nassagaweya, but not Waterdown.

The exact date of the church closure is unknown, but was possibly as early as 1875 or as late as 1888, when the congregation dispersed to Waterdown, Lowville or St. John’s in Nelson. No deed for the sale of the Anglican Church property has been found, hence the notation on maps in the Land Registry Office that no deed was ever registered. When the congregation ceased to exist, the drive shed was moved to the Carlisle intersection to serve as the original Bates & Green Garage and the church was reputedly sold and moved, possibly to the village.

Without buildings on the property, the cemetery was allowed to become overgrown. The total number of burials on the property is unknown. Long-time local residents recall the number as being between 12 and 20 stones. Those that have been located date from the years when the cemetery was owned by the Methodist congregation.

In the Spring of 1987, some members of The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society and the Hamilton Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society undertook a grid search of the lot and discovered four large, but damaged monuments and half a dozen ground support stones, all located under a thick ground cover of periwinkle and raspberry canes.

Several years after the investigation of the site, the Flamborough’s archivist located the deeds between the Trustees of the Chapel of the Canadian Wesleyan New Connexion Church and the Anglican Church at the Niagara Diocese office in Hamilton. When the deeds – sent from Toronto in the 1940s – were found, there was no church building in Carlisle at the time, and they never investigated the possibility of an abandoned cemetery existing.