Description of Historic Place

Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery is located off Lumsden North Road, in the town of Lumsden, NL. It is a grassy, fenced cemetery containing approximately 41 gravestones. The municipal heritage designation includes all the fenced area of cemetery land, and the grave markers and grave plot boundaries within it.

Heritage Value

Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of Lumsden because of its historic and aesthetic value.

Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery has historic value as a physical record of Lumsden’s history, the cemetery markers serving as both historic records and artifacts on the landscape. Permanent settlers were recorded in Cat Harbour - the present day community of Lumsden – in the late 1700s and early 1800s, although not in any great numbers until the mid 1800s. Those buried in Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery would be the descendants of earlier settlers, as the majority of the headstones are dated post 1900. The earliest known date on a headstone is 1876. In the early 1900s the cemetery was moved from an older site on the beach due to flooding so it is possible that older markers were lost.

The cemetery is not associated with any particular religious denomination. Early settlers were mostly members of the Roman Catholic and Church of England faiths. The Methodist population grew in the mid 1800s and by the second decade of the 1900s many residents had become Jehovah’s Witnesses (the first congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Newfoundland was established in Lumsden by 1917). Members of all these faiths are laid to rest in the Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery.

Old Lumsden North (Cat Harbour) Cemetery has aesthetic value due to its unique environmental setting and placement of burial plots. The cemetery is located in a grassy, partially wooded area not far from Lumsden Beach. The cemetery provides an impressive view of vast sandy beaches, sand dunes, marshes, Outer Cat Island and Inner Cat Island.

Source: Town of Lumsden Heritage Regulations May 28, 2012.

Character-Defining Elements

Those elements which contribute to the site’s historic and aesthetic value including:
-style, placement and materials of original memorial stones and monuments with their surviving inscriptions;
-grassy groundcover;
-existence of fencing to contain the site;
-location of site, and;
-view to and from the cemetery from a variety of vantage points.

Notes of interest:
Surnames on the extant grave markers at the cemetery include Butt, Goodyear, Gray, Gudger, Hatcher, Howell, Milendy, Norman, Parsons, Robins, Sheppard, Weste and Wright.