Researcher says: CITY OWNS ABANDONED CEMETERY

[Welland Tribune, Date Unknown]

WELLAND STAFF: City Council tomorrow night will order a title search on the old Price Family Cemetery on Colbeck Drive, but Anthony Whelan says he already has proof the 144-year old cemetery is city property.

Whelan, a local amateur genealogist who is pressing the city to restore and maintain the tiny cemetery, found documentation at the Welland Land Registry office showing its ownership was transferred to the city in 1960, possibly as part of the land annex for the construction of a nearby bridge that has since been dismantled. It took him an hour and a half, he says.

George Marshall, chairman of the parks, recreation and arena committee, says the city will fulfill its responsibility under the Ontario Cemeteries Act if a title search indicates it must.

The cemeteries Act makes all owners of cemeteries responsible for keeping them in good condition. When a cemetery is unowned, it becomes the responsibility of the municipality in which it sits.

At a closed meeting on Oct. 22, the parks, recreation and arena committee voted to order both a title search and a “clean-up” at the cemetery.

The recommendation will be before council on Tuesday, and Marshall says city workers will be sent to begin clearing the site soon after.

He did not suggest a date, however, added the matter is to be reviewed by city solicitor Barbara Moloney.

The cemetery-now overgrown with weeds and bushes, most of its headstones beneath the soil and its fence all but fallen down-is one of two cemeteries used by the descendants of David Price, thought to be the first white settler in Welland, The other was long ago pushed aside to build homes near Denistoun Street and the Welland River.

The only visible headstone at the cemeteries bears the name of Sarah Hutson, a member of the Price family who married a man named James Hutson.

She was buried in July, 1886. The first record burial at the site took place in 1842, although Whelan suspects Elisha Price, the first member of the family to own the property on which the cemetery is located, is buried there with his wife. Elisha Price died in 1824.

Whelan has done considerable research on the cemetery and views it as an invaluable piece of Welland’s history.

He is angered that it has been left to fall into its current state, feeling the city has been reluctant to devote money to taking care of the cemetery, while spending much larger sums of money on projects of lesser importance.

Between August 1973 and April 1975, city council and the parks committee dealt with the matter without significant results.

A chronology of the matter compiled by city staff shows a series of recommendations, letters and motions that trailed off on April 1, 1975, with an apparently unfulfilled council instruction to the city solicitor for a title search to be conducted.

“This has gone on before,” Marshall admitted this week.

“I guess it just drifted away, as some issues do.”

He said, however, the parks committee would take steps to see the city’s responsibility under the Cemeteries Act, if it can be established, is fulfilled.

“It’s clear in the Cemeteries Act,” he said. “It certainly appears to be our responsibility.

“It’s one of the first cemeteries in Welland, so it obviously has some important historical merit.”

Whelan has the backing of the Welland Historical Society, which voted recently to support his effort with the city.

“The pressure has to be kept on,” he said recently, vowing to do so until he sees the cemetery well maintained. The money required to do so, he claims, would be comparable to the roughly $1,600 which will be devoted to staging the opening of the renovated farmer’s market next month.

There’s an urgency now, because a lot of this stuff is disappearing,” he says.

“I feel that urgency.”