UPDATE: May 19, 2023:
A meeting to set the future course for the Dorchester Rural Cemetery was well attended on Wednesday evening, and ended with a slate of nine members forming a new board to oversee the cemetery.
Organizer Marlene Hickman says longtime solo caretaker Peter Spence will join the group as Past President, to ensure a smooth transition to the community board.
The future of the cemetery looks bright, says Hickman. The new board has already set their first meeting date.
The nearly 200-year-old Dorchester Rural Cemetery overlooks Back Brook, just off the 106, across from Palmers Pond, in the Village of Dorchester. It’s a lovely setting, and well-kept, thanks to lone volunteer caretaker Peter Spence.
For decades Spence has been the one-person board that looks after the community cemetery, and now a group of volunteers are looking to form a new board to take over the task.
“At at some point, somebody is going to have to be the new me,” says Spence. And that’s the topic of a meeting tonight at the Dorchester Veterans Community Centre at 7pm.
Diane Nicholson is one of the driving forces behind that meeting. Nicholson is a history buff, but says there’s a lack of documentation about the Dorchester Rural Cemetery. She knows it was once called Greenwood Cemetery, and is not affiliated with a church, though it was considered a Protestant cemetery. She also knows it’s the final resting place of a Father of Confederation, Edward Barron Chandler, and also a contemporary of his who fought against confederation, Albert Smith.
There are family names on the headstones that are still common today, and others that aren’t around anymore. “But at one time, they were so prominent,” says Nicholson. The graves of Chandler and Smith are easy to spot, with large obelisk-type stones, with Chandler’s marked by a plaque installed by the federal government. Smith’s obelisk is just a bit taller, on a slightly higher knoll than Chandler’s, points out Nicholson with a laugh. But although the two men disagreed politically in life, Smith was a pall bearer at Chandler’s funeral. “Evidently, they put their differences aside,” says Nicholson.
The cemetery is full of New Brunswick “movers and shakers” says Nicholson, considering that in its hey day, Dorchester was the shire town of Westmoreland County, and at one time not only bigger than Sackville, but bigger than Moncton.
“It was big,” says Nicholson. “There were 14 lawyers in the village square… The court was here, three shipbuilders building wooden sailing ships… hotels. It was really quite the place.”
But the twists and turns of history have taken Dorchester down a very different road than Moncton, and its now a small village, albeit one with more than its share of built heritage. For the Dorchester Rural Cemetery to continue on as an active community cemetery, Nicholson and her colleague Marlene Hickman say there needs to be fresh blood.
“You’re looking at a group of people that are all 70 and older,” says Hickman. “We need the next generation to move up.”
Sadly, the cemetery is already home to some of the next generation, says Hickman. “We need to look to the future,” she says. “The history is important. It makes this cemetery significant and so many ways. But we need a future for the cemetery as well.”
The Dorchester Rural Cemetery organizing meeting takes place Wednesday, May 17, at 7pm at the Dorchester Veterans Community Centre at 4955 Main Street in Dorchester.
Hear this story as reported on Tantramar Report:
