St. John the Baptist: Heritage Church, Colwood B.C.

My group (Abbey, Lisa, and Kate) and I are looking at St. John the Baptist’s Church in Colwood as the focus of our Monument assignment. I suggested it one day in class, saying that I knew of a cute little church out near where I lived that (as I recalled) had about 20 graves in its cute little churchyard. So everyone agreed that this seemed like a great idea because it was unlikely that anyone had done this one before. But, seeing as my memory of the church was supplied to be by my eleven-year-old brain, there were well over 20 graves… there are actually 153 graves within the yard.

This is a rough map (I hate to call it that) of the Quadrants of the Churchyard.

Q1: 2/26 graves have upright markers, Q2: 8/71, Q3: 7/39, Q4: 1/17. 

St. John the Baptist Church was the first Anglican Church in Colwood, built in 1912 and consecrated in 1913. It was an active church up until 1986 when the congregation moved to a new church close by. In 1996 it was restored and in 1997 the city of Colwood took over managing the church and its associated “pioneer” graveyards. All of this information is supplied on an upright stone by the southeast entrance to the yard, donated in memory of Ernie and Hilda Emery, more information on the church can be found on the city of Colwood's website: http://colwood.iwebez.com/siteengine/ActivePage.asp?PageID=39 .

We decided, after gathering information on most of the graves in Q1 and Q2 that some serious scaling down was in order. And so for this project we chose to look at up right markers over a foot tall to see if there were any similarities between them. The graveyard hosts 18 upright markers, in correlation with 9 single graves and 8 shared graves (one of which has 2 upright markers).

The graves that we have chosen mainly appear in Q2 and Q3, on the northeast half of the yard, and they mainly face northeast as well, with the exception of the graves closest to the northeast fence, which face the church. This is a commonality with all of the assumed inhumations in this churchyard, cremation plaques generally line the fence perimeter and orient towards the church. The most common dimensions for the graves with standing markers and a cement covering were 8ft by 4ft, with the exception of Hubert Wilberforce Wilson (who I wrote a blog about on Friday) who’s grave was 9ft by 4ft. The most common dimensions of the multiple graves were 8ft by 10ft. The markers themselves varied quite a bit, the shortest one we looked at was 1ft by 2ft, and the tallest being 5ft by 2.3ft.

The oldest burial in the graveyard is that of the Wells in Q3. It appears that the marker was first chosen and dedicated by his wife, Janet. The stone sits upon a typical cement 8ft by 4ft cement cover and stands 1.25ft by 1.5ft. The inscription reads “In loving memory of my husband Arthur Wells, sometimes rector of this perish, at rest Jan. 9, 1919, aged 60. Thy will be done. Janet Wells June 12, 1948, aged 91 yrs.” One interesting aspect of this grave is that it appears that there use to be another section to the top of the grave that may have been removed. The grave of Emma Ogden suggests that it too had a topper of some sorts; we believe that it could be possible for her and the Wells to have had crosses on top due to the similarity in the bases between the Wells and Daniel George Ruddle.

The top of the Wells grave.

The front of the Wells grave.

After the 1955 there are no “new” upright markers, meaning that all death dates appearing on upright markers past 1955 are being added onto pre-existing, shared, markers. The last marker appears to be that of the Hankins, Alfred (died 1955) and Eveline (died 1975), also in Q3. The name Verna M. Dyer (died 1942) is included at the bottom of the marker as well but, judging by the space the grave could take up, three inhumations would not fit, although the idea of cremations being added to the plot could explain this. This marker, unlike most of the ones we looked at, is not on top of a cement cover so we are not actually sure how large the grave plot is.

The tallest marker was that of Daniel George Ruddle, who died in 1936. The marker on his grave stands 5 ft tall; it consists of 1.25ft three-tiered base, bottom section being 2.5ft wide, with a 3.75ft cross on the top of it. It is based off of this grave that we believe that the Wells grave may have had a marker on top as well.  This grave sticks out the most in the churchyard, visually, and it would be an interesting task (given more time) to find out what type of impact he must have had in Colwood during his life.

Daniel George Ruddle

   The Rant grave,  8x10ft. Audrey Clark's plaque is in the centre.

The most people remembered on one grave are on the Rants/Clark marker. Annie shares her 8ft by 10ft with her husband Capt. William John Rant and Daughters (?) Geraldine Muriel Rant and Audrey Edith Clark. The first three names all appear on the same gravestone, standing 2.3 ft high and 2 ft wide, while Audrey’s name, birth, and death date appear on what seems to be a secondary marker added in the middle of the grave. We believe that, since the dimensions of the grave matches up with the average of the other double graves that either a) not all of the bodies are actually in this grave and Audrey’s marker is more of an epitaph is there to link her to her family while she might actually be buried somewhere else, or b) some of the Rant’s are buried here and some of them are cremated and were added to the grave later. The Rant stone includes the birthplaces and death place of both Annie and William but only supply the birth date and death date of Geraldine and Audrey.

From looking at the information gathered, we can show that upright markers in this churchyard are present between 1919 and 1955, are usually in association with grave covers measuring 8x4 or 8x10ft, and occur in relation to single graves as often as they do to shared graves. Also, the majority of upright graves appear on the north east side of the church; 83% of the markers were in Q2 and Q3. The highest ratio of upright markers to low graves is in Q3, where there was a 1:5.5 ratio, this lends to the idea that this section of the grave yard was more preferred for upright markers, possibly because it was more preferred by the wealthier members of the parish? Most of the grave markers in Q3 are granite, where as in Q 1,2, and 4 the markers were a mixture of granite and cement, this could indicate a higher economic class for those with granite head markers because during this time most of the islands granite came from Nelson island. In fact, the parliament buildings second stage of building took place around the same time as St. John's opened (1913-1915) which imported a great quantity of granite for its construction. The granite came from a Nelson Island quarry and it is possible that granite was more accessible due to the provincial demand. Another interesting little piece of information is that the Nelson mines declined in output in the 1950's and stopped in 1965, around the same time that we stop seeing the upright graves in the churchyard (Hora&Hancock).

 I feel that, given more time, we could have created our entire website project based on this churchyard. In order to learn more about the people in this cemetery we would need to do some research in the archives of city hall and potentially speak with some of the older members of the new parish.

Here is a link to the document filled with our data…

Grave Yard Data:

http://anth392withemily.blogspot.com/2012/02/st-john-baptist-heritage-church-colwood_18.html


 Our Google Map of the grave yard with pictures and all inscriptions of Upright Markers:

http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?msid=204963798280823419783.0004b8079b916fc538ac8&msa=0

References:
Hora, Zdenek D. and Kirk D. Hancock, 2008. "Geology of the parliament buildings 6. Geology of the British Columbia parliament buildings, Victoria." Geoscience Canada. Geological Association of Canada. vol 35, no.2.