Christ
Church Poplar Lake Cemetery
The Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd has taken on the restoration of
this rural pioneer cemetery as one of our 2010 centennial projects.
Christ Church Poplar Lake was an Anglican Church located in what is now
Sturgeon County on a 2 acre square parcel of land at the junction of today's 82nd
Street and 195th Avenue. It
is now surrounded on all four sides by land belonging to the Canadian army's
Edmonton Garrison (previously RCAF Base Lancaster Park).
This area [Township 54, Range 24, W4] was known in the last decades of
the 19th and in the early 20th centuries as Poplar Lake.
(Poplar Lake is the prairie slough that forces the bend in 82nd
Street just North of 167th Avenue.)
The parish was the creation of the first Anglican missionary in the Edmonton
area, The Rev (later Canon) William Newton.
He was sent here in 1875 as missionary to settlers but found only Hudson
Bay people, Indians, and Métis.
In 1876 he established the parish of All Saints at 119 Street and Jasper
Avenue. His own homestead at Clover
Bar, named the Hermitage, is now Hermitage Park.
He was also tasked as missionary in the area ranging as far afield as
Victoria Settlement. On retiring as
Rector of All Saints Parish (then located at 119 Street and Jasper Avenue) he
focused on missionary work and in 1893 established his second parish, Christ
Church Poplar Lake.
He
built the log church on the NW corner of a quarter section homestead patented to
Kingston Powell. Title to the church
land was given in 1897. There is no
record of money being paid to Powell for the title but Newton had married Powell
in 1893. The first known burial,
Elisha Rowswell, age 71, occurred in 1898. The
parish registries give testimonial to an active spiritual life with attendance
averaging 40-50 every second Sunday afternoon with many baptisms and
confirmations. During
the Great War so many priests went overseas as chaplains that there was a dire
shortage of clergy at home. The
parish closed in the period
1915-1920, reopened in 1921 then closed finally in 1926.
Documentary evidence points to up to fifteen burials in the cemetery
although two of these have been disinterred and reburied elsewhere.
One priest that seems to have had the longest association with Christ Church Poplar Lake was The Rev. (later Canon) Richard Michael Swan. He emigrated from Canterbury in 1913 funded by the Archbishops' [Canterbury and York] Western Canada Fund. He has left us photographs of the Christ Church congregation and interior of the church taken on Easter Sunday 1914. For much of the period of closure from 1915 to 1921 he ministered in the Lac Ste.-Anne area. He wrote a fascinating account of his time in the Lac Ste.-Anne area which shows a great appreciation of the warmth its people and he is buried in the region. He is listed in the Henderson Guide in 1920 as “Priest-in-Charge” of the Edmonton Mission House – from which priests travelled to service outlying areas – and his wife as “Lady-in-Charge”. She died in 1921 and is buried in the Christ Church cemetery. Canon Swan became rector of St. Mary's then St. Michael and All Angels. A son, Richard Carey, born to second wife Mary Victoria, was baptized by the bishop of Edmonton at St. James' on 31 Jan 1926. (Both of these parishes were in the North East close to 118th Avenue.) The Henderson Guide of 1926 lists him living at St. Mary's, 6512 118 Avenue (presumably in the rectory. He seems to have ministered to the Poplar Lake Church from St. Michael's. He carried out the last recorded burial in the cemetery – Sarah Sweetnam – in 1925. She was disinterred and reburied in the Edmonton Cemetery (107 Avenue) in 1927. There is a parish vestry register that shows his methodical, dedicated hand directing the parish from his arrival in 1913 until final closing in 1926. He retired in 1926, the same year that the parish was closed. After 1926 he no longer appears in the Henderson guides and one wonders if he and his new family moved to the Lac Ste.-Anne area.
Frere, Al and Art at Poplar Lake Cemetery on July 18, 2004 looking at John Fielder's granite marker.
The various records of burials are
cursory and contradictory. We can
document fourteen or fifteen burials, but a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
survey done in 2006 suggests as many as eighteen probable gravesites.
This is not surprising given the passage of time and that for most of its
history there has been no church presence on the cemetery site.
Also, it seems that in these early pioneer days there was never a
permanent priest residing at the site, priests would travel from Edmonton –
All Saint's parish, The Edmonton Mission House or St. Michael's – and conduct
services whenever they could.
An example of the triangular stone markers.
Thanks
to a 1959 RCAF blueprint of the cemetery which marks seven gravestones we are
reasonably sure of who occupied some of these graves.
As of August, 2009 all five surviving grave stones have been placed in a
memorial area beside the large Fielders family granite marker.
We will be placing simple granite markers for those who have no marker
today in a row behind the existing makers. A
chart will be made available indicating known or probable burial locations.
It is a simple reality that we will never know where some of the burials
are located in the cemetery including the four members of the Fielders family.
The cemetery has been neglected over the years but is in the final stages of restoration. The Alberta Government has now authorized the sale of new burial plots. It is under the care of the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, a parish in the North Edmonton neighbourhood of Castle Downs, and we are now authorized by Alberta Consumer Affairs to sell grave plots.
Gravestones in place on October 4, 2009
The following
table is a result of information gleaned from the records of the
Anglican Diocese of Edmonton held at the Provincial Archives, files of the
Alberta Genealogical Society, and
census and homesteading land records. It
reflects a research project that is a very much “a work in progress”.
We present it in this somewhat crude form in the hope that readers can
fill some gaps in our knowledge about this cemetery, the community, and the
settlers that lived there. We would
love to hear from anyone with information on the cemetery.
An article printed in the St. Albert Gazette on the cemetery is available at the link: Parishioners in the news