History

The plot of land for the original cemetery was patented from the Crown to Mr. John Snyder, a British veteran of the American Revolution, in 1803. Mr. Snyder then deeded the property for five pounds sterling in 1825 to Mr. John Adams, Mr. Abram Fleming, Mr. Lewis Grant, Mr. William Beach, and Mr. Henry Vonbury for the purpose of building a church. The surrounding land was to be a burial ground. The land had been used as a cemetery before the transfer of ownership. The earliest burial may have been as early as 1797.

Adjacent parcels were purchased from Mr. John and Mr. Nathaniel Kennedy in 1889, and Mr. Sanford and Mrs. Ida Beach in 1910. The Canadian Pacific Railway sold a section of land to the cemetery for fifty dollars and donated another in the 1910s or 1920s.

As the cemetery grew, the need for maintenance grew equally as older graves fell victim to harsh winters and lack of family caretakers.

On December 8th 1927, a public meeting was held at South Gower Baptist Church that formally established a board of trustees for South Gower Cemetery. The original board consisted of Mr. James Beggs (Chair), Mr. William Latourell (Secretary), Mr. William Sloan, Mr. Robert Bryan, and Mr. Charles Patton.

Several meetings were held over the next two years at the Baptist Church, Pelton's Corners Schoolhouse, or the Latourell home. These meetings resulted in the establishment and enacting of by-laws, the purchase of a seal for the cemetery, the organization of Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), and the planning for perpetual care of the cemetery through the government of Ontario. In 1928, the board also purchased more land from the Canadian Pacific Railway and had a well dug on the cemetery property.

The first Decoration Day was held on July 7, 1929.

Through the 1930s, the cemetery added the current burial vault that sits across South Gower Drive from the cemetery and a wrought-iron fence that had to be removed in the 1990s.

The next major addition to the cemetery was the Memorial Chapel. The Chapel was dedicated on Memorial Day, July 4th 1965.

In the early 1990s, all markers within the cemetery were surveyed to establish a burial database for organizational and genealogical purposes. The oldest marker still intelligible at that time was from the burial of Isabella Jane Adams in 1807. As of 2005, between the 1990s survey and established burial records kept by the board, upwards of 4000 burials have been recorded.