Wonderful take on Beechwood

This is from Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen columnist, and it's a fascinating look at Ottawa's famous Beechwood Cemetery.  I'm going to blog about my family's ties to Beechwood, where B and I will be laid, but this gives the big picture:

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Some of the headstones at Beechwood Cemetery, particularly in the older military section, are almost completely covered in snow these days, the names of those interred below them temporarily hidden from view.

But winter hasn’t completely won. There are indentations in the snow around each marker, as the sun warms the stones and the reflected heat melts the snow around them. If you squint your imagination a little, it’s not difficult to picture the stories of those long dead souls freeing themselves for our benefit.

Beechwood turns 150 years old this year, and it’s worth reflecting on that, too. Far from simply a place to house the departed, it is a repository of the lives and stories of close to 85,000 people scattered throughout the cemetery’s 160 acres. They are the threads that made up the fabric of Ottawa. The statesmen and stateswomen are here, true, but so are the rogues, the “unfortunates,” the friendless. It’s a living, changing testament, with new stories added all the time and old ones occasionally amended. It’s full of tradition, history, poignancy and, sometimes, humour. In many respects, it’s a public library with fresh air.

Many of Ottawa’s founders and builders are here that I wonder if one could faithfully recreate a map of the city’s streets based on the headstone names: Booth, MacLaren, Besserer, Rochester, Bronson, Featherston, Fisher, Gilmour, Hopewell, Lyon, Powell, Holland and Slater are only a few among them. (Sir Wilfrid Laurier calls the adjacent Notre Dame cemetery home now, a not-insignificant hole in the map.)

Meanwhile, there has to be a full cord’s worth of lumbermen buried here, and more than enough prominent politicians to start a debating club, including Sir Robert Borden, Marion and Paul Dewar, Tommy Douglas and Andrew Haydon, with former governor general Ray Hnatyshyn available to moderate.

On the topic of debates, one can only imagine the spectral discussions that might occur here between the likes of Nicholas Flood Davin, Duncan Campbell Scott and Peter Henderson Bryce — architect, advocate and whistleblower, respectively, of Canada’s residential schools. If you don’t know their stories, I urge you to attend one of Beechwood’s Reconciliation tours (June 11, July 16 and Aug. 20).

As home to our national military cemetery, Beechwood boasts generals and privates and every rank in between. Lt. Alexis H. Helmer, whose death inspired Maj. John McCrae’s war poem In Flanders Fields, is memorialized at his family’s plot here. I like to come here on Remembrance Day, hours before the official ceremony begins, and ask visiting family members to tell me about their loved ones buried here.

But the Who’s Who list is only one aspect of Beechwood’s attraction. You’ll also find lesser-known stories and relationships that, together, etch some kind of understanding of humanity. Detective Thomas Stoneman, the first Ottawa police officer killed in the line of duty, is buried at Beechwood, as is his killer, Eugene Larment, the last person hanged in Ottawa.

The flat markers of Rosa Shaw (1895-1981) and Bettie Cole (1908-1989) also fascinate and draw me. Shaw was the first women’s pages editor at the Montreal Gazette and a champion and mentor to young female journalists. She threw lavish parties, drove around town in a convertible roadster and, according to former CBC journalist and Senator Betty Kennedy, was in her heyday the “best-heeled woman in Ottawa.” Cole, meanwhile, according to her marker, was the first “girl journalist” on the men’s general staff at the Ottawa Citizen. 

The pair lived together in numerous houses in Sandy Hill in the 1940s and ‘50s before moving to Cumberland in the mid-1950s, and then to Orleans in the ‘70s. They reportedly had a falling out, and when Shaw died in 1981, only three people attended her burial. Cole was not one of them. Today, though, the two are buried five plots apart, perhaps mirroring their close but ultimately estranged relationship. Their headstones, identical in style, were paid for by Cole. If Facebook had been around then, I suspect each would have listed her relationship status as “It’s complicated.”

Elsewhere at Beechwood, the institutional group plots of the Protestant Orphans Home, the Protestant Home for the Aged, and the Home for Friendless Women, all of which opened in Ottawa in the latter half of the 19th century, were once just that: institutional, without names of those buried there. But in 2013, thanks to the largesse of an anonymous donor, a plaque was erected commemorating and naming the 87 people who had been forgotten and nameless for so long — another example of the cemetery serving as a chronicler of Ottawa’s past.

There are also the headstones themselves, a collection of beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) fonts, iconography, architecture and sentiment. Some have curious stories behind them, such as Agnes Wilson’s, who died in December 1939 at 37, before her husband could fulfil his promise to one day buy her a castle. Instead, he did it posthumously, her headstone a castle carved from a large rock.

On most visits, though, I’m content to take it all in without turning it into a history lesson. There’s a large headstone that simply reads “PROPER” on one side. I’ve never checked the opposite side, as I figure it will likely ruin my hope that that’s all there is, like simply an announcement of a proper burial. A little mystery is not always a bad thing.

Meanwhile, with its undulating landscape, crisscrossing paths and preponderance of trees, Beechwood is simply one of Ottawa’s most idyllic spots for walks and early-morning reflection. It’s a favourite of dog-walkers, joggers and those who simply need some quiet. When my kids were youngsters, we’d sometimes just drive through the cemetery at dusk, each lost in our own thoughts.

Consider this Ottawa Citizen report from June 1874, when Beechwood was only a year old:

“The Roman Catholic and Beechwood Cemeteries were visited by crowds of citizens yesterday, desirous of escaping the blinding dust of the streets and enjoying the beauties of nature in this romantic spot. Beechwood Cemetery is becoming a favorite resort on Sunday, and we would advise those of our readers who have not seen the ground to pay it a visit some pleasant afternoon during the present month while the foliage is at its greatest.”

Beechwood is holding numerous events this year in celebration of its sesquicentennial. The next is on March 28, when Ireland’s Ambassador to Canada, Eamonn McKee, will be a guest speaker to talk about the Irish and their roles in making Canada. 

Or you can simply visit anytime,  and learn as much or as little as you want. For the best access and foliage, though, you might wait until the sun has finished melting all the snow.