Description of Historic Place

This early pioneer cemetery is located within the Prince Edward Island National Park in Stanhope. It is situated on the Bubbling Springs Trail off the Gulf Shore Highway. The site is in a grassed area with birch trees and is surrounded by a low stone dyke. It contains both plain sandstone markers as well as stones with inscriptions.

Heritage Value

The cemetery is valued for its historical association with some of the earliest residents of the Stanhope area and for the variety and style of the remaining gravestones.

After the British held a land lottery for lots of land in St. John's Island, this area of Lot 34 came under the ownership of Sir James Montgomery, the Lord Advocate of Scotland. As a proprietor, Montgomery was to bring out settlers and improve his land. In 1770, he sponsored a vessel called the Falmouth to take settlers to the Island. He put David Lawson (1720-c 1803) in charge of developing a flax farm. Lawson also recruited fifty indentured servants from Perthshire to work the land. They established Stanhope Farm near the Long Pond on land which had been partially cleared earlier by Acadians.

Among the settlers who came on the Falmouth were members of the Higgins, Miller, Brown, and Shaw families. Later settlers included Auld, McGregor, Curtis, Bovyer, Steele, Marshall, McDonald, Roper, McCormick, and Sentner.

The first burial on this site was that of Catherine MacKay in 1790. The grave markers consist of simple sandstones as well as inscribed stones. It is known that several of the sandstone markers represent American sailors who were victims of the 1851 Yankee Gale. In the 1880s, eighteen graves on the site were exhumed and reinterred in Brackley Point and Portage. Some of the legible stones on the site are those of James Lawson (1760-1833), one of the children of David Lawson, as well as William Higgins (1794-1864) a fisherman who was a grandson of David Lawson.

Today, the site is maintained by Parks Canada as part of the Prince Edward Island National Park.

Source: Culture and Heritage Division, PEI Department of Communities, Cultural Affairs and Labour, Charlottetown, PE C1A 7N8
File #: 4310-20/P26

Character-Defining Elements

The heritage value of the cemetery is shown in the following character-defining elements:

- the location of the cemetery on the Bubbling Springs Trail in the PEI National Park
- the low stone dyke around the cemetery
- the plain sandstone grave markers
- the inscribed stone grave markers
- the potential for other unmarked graves on the site