Description of Historic Place

The Old Catholic Cemetery is a small cemetery surrounded by white-painted, wooden fencing and is located at East Tickle Road in the Town of Leading Tickles. The Municipal Heritage Land designation includes all the land area of the cemetery fenced in at the time of designation.

Heritage Value

The Old Catholic Cemetery, or East Tickle R.C. Cemetery, has historic and aesthetic values.

The Old Catholic Cemetery, or East Tickle R.C. Cemetery, has historic value as the third oldest cemetery in the Town of Leading Tickles and because of its connection to the Catholic faith in the community. The cemetery appears to date from at least the first half of the twentieth century and stayed in use until at least the late 1950s.

The cemetery’s headstone inscriptions also have value as historic records. The three surviving stones commemorate Patrick Butler (1920), Patrick Butler (1956), and Patrick Cook (1958). The latter Butler was a First World War Veteran whose headstone identifies him as having been a Private with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. The three stones also present something of the chronology of headstone styles, the first a table type in white marble, the second a column type in white marble, and the third a tablet type in grey granite.

The Old Catholic Cemetery also has aesthetic value because of its traditional appearance. Many graves are without headstones, but individual grave plots are identifiable by raised wooden boundary markers within whose perimeters the ground is covered in gravel, further distinguishing them from the rest of the cemetery, which is of natural vegetation. In typical fashion, the cemetery is surrounded by traditional, white-painted, wooden paling fencing. Taken together, the fence, plot boundary markers, ground cover and headstones combine to make the cemetery a distinctive cultural landscape feature in the East Tickle section of Leading Tickles.

Source: Motion #07-66, Town Council Meeting Minutes, Town of Leading Tickles, 2007/07/20

Character-Defining Elements

All those elements that help define the traditional nature of the cemetery, including:
-location of the cemetery in the community;
-types, materials and placements of extant headstones;
-types, materials and placements of extant grave plot boundary fencing;
-natural, grassy topography;
-and white-painted wooden fencing surrounding cemetery.