Description of Historic Place

St. Matthew's Anglican Cemetery Municipal Heritage Site is located on the grounds of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church off St. Matthew’s Street, in the Town of St. Lawrence. The cemetery has been in use since the nineteenth century. The municipal heritage designation includes the entire cemetery area bounded by fencing and the church building.

Heritage Value

St. Matthew’s Anglican Cemetery has spiritual, historic and aesthetic values.

The cemetery has spiritual and historic values as a consecrated Anglican burial ground in use for over a century. The oldest extant headstone indicates that it was established by at least the early 1860s.

St. Matthew’s Anglican Cemetery has historic value through its connection to St. Lawrence’s fluorspar mining industry, which was of primary importance to the local economy from the 1930s through most of the 1970s. St. Matthew’s and other area cemeteries point to the unfortunate side of St. Lawrence’s mining heritage, as the remains of some 200 miners whose deaths were linked to occupational disease are interred at those sites.

The cemetery has historic value because its gravemarkers are inscribed with information pertaining to genealogy, such as familial relationships and dates of birth and death. The extant markers record over thirty local surnames.

The cemetery’s gravemarkers have artifactual value. White marble is the predominant material of the older headstones, typical of the time in which they were produced, as are their designs and carved motifs.

The preponderance of marble gravemarkers punctuating the grassy cemetery ground contributes to the site’s aesthetic value by evoking the nineteenth and early twentieth century period, as does the rather organic way in which the grave plots were laid out over the years. The site is situated on a high plain overlooking the harbour and is very visible from most points in the community. These combined elements make St. Matthew’s Anglican Cemetery a distinctive historic place in St. Lawrence.

Source: Motion 05-128, Town of St. Lawrence Town Council meeting of 2006/08/16

Character-Defining Elements

All those elements which contribute to the aesthetic and historic significance of the site:

-inscriptions and designs of gravemarkers;
-preponderance of marble headstones amongst the older gravemarkers;
-grassy groundcover;
-and visible location on a high elevation, on the church grounds.