Saugeen Shores continues to look for help to deal with the erosion of its historic Pioneer Cemetery in Southampton.
The 1860 cemetery is located at the top of the slope along the Saugeen River in the northeast part of town.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says, “The cemetery was located very close to the edge of the embankment, obviously over the decades, and more than a century that it’s been there, there’s been erosion on the embankment.”
He says the graves will fall into the river as erosion continues.
Charbonneau explains, “The best approach is to take the graves that are at risk and disinter them and move them to a safer location, which is a process, as you can imagine that is really complicated and something that has to be handled very delicately.”
He adds, “It’s well above the capacity of the municipality to manage, I think, in the way it needs to be managed, which is why I think the Province is the organization with the wherewithal to help with that.”
The Town has been looking into the issue for at least a decade.
Representatives from the Town have been meeting over the past year or so with a few provincial ministries, trying to secure funding to address the problem. They met in August with provincial government reps at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference.
One of the issues with the situation is the matter doesn’t fit snugly into the purview of any specific ministry.
Saugeen Shores Manager of Strategic Initiatives Jill Roote says they’ve met with the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, and they’ve also met with the Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism.
She says, “We’ve been really struggling to get provincial funding and we’re just trying to find the right ministry to support us,”
“We’re sort of like this round peg that we’re trying to put into a square hole,” says Roote.
She says the Town wants to do remediation of the site, explaining, “What we want to do is move those sites back so that they don’t fall into the river.”
The Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery doesn’t have a program in place to address remediation.
Roote says since the site is a heritage cemetery that contains the graves of original settlers to Saugeen Shores and a number of Metis people, (She says they’re not currently sure if there are any First Nations people buried there, noting, they’re still looking), this summer, they spoke to the Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism.
Roote was optimistic about the meeting with Minister Michael Ford, noting, “He wasn’t sure either if this was the appropriate ministry, but he did make a commitment that he would work with his colleagues and find who would be able to provide some funding to help remediate the cemetery.”
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says, “They keep accepting our delegations, which is a positive thing. I think there’s a genuine desire inside the government to find some way to support this. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of the funding pools that they have available.”
He notes, generally, it’s up to municipalities to maintain and operate their cemeteries, but he adds, this Pioneer Cemetery is a different case. “It’s a cemetery actively eroding. It’s disappearing into the Saugeen River,” says Charbonneau.
“We think there’s a provincial interest in preserving the heritage of that site and just in protecting those graves. The ancestors of the people who live here today, their graves are there and they deserve the dignity protection, just like any grave site,” says Charbonneau.
He adds, “We’ll certainly be investing in it as a municipality and we think the province has a role to play to invest there too.”
Charbonneau says at this point, it’s estimated to cost around $800,000.