A 118-year-old gravesite near Crossfield has been restored thanks to the help of a group of locals who call themselves the Gravesite Guardians. The historical gravesite just north of town is the burial place of four children ranging from five months to 11 years old, all of whom were buried within just six months of each other.
Jessica Turner, a Crossfield local, recounted how she used to drive past the overgrown site wondering what it was. After posting about the site in a Facebook group, she learned it was the gravesite of Wellington, Vera, Leslie, and Fletcher Reid.
After researching the family, they learned a lot about the four children buried there.The youngest three children died within a day of each other in 1906, while the oldest died five months later in 1907.
“When I saw it in person, I felt really heartbroken because there's these four young children that are buried here and the tree is so overgrown that the branches are touching the ground to the gate that's in the front,” Turner said. “The grass is so overgrown and so high and the fence is kind of falling apart. There was a wooden berm on the back that had completely collapsed.”
Quickly, an online conversation spurred on community participation in the restoration of the gravesite. With permission from the landowner, a group of local residents went in and cut branches from the tree and cleared the ground around the site. Another community member fixed the wooden wall and did some welding.
Members levelled the dirt and cleaned up the headstones before a local nursery donated mulch to put around the site. Some of the members recently added a bench and they are still planning to repaint the fence and add rocks around the headstone.
“I'm hoping to have Rocky View County actually give us a commemorative plaque just because it is, I would assume, a historical grave site because it is over 100 years old,” Turner said.
A Tragic History
One of the group’s members, April Walters took her research online and discovered not only the death certificates and family history, but also connected with some living family members of the Reid’s. She said her own family lived around the area back in 1911 and they might have known each other.
A journal written by a sibling of the buried children recounted the fall of 1906 when diphtheria struck, which took the lives of the three youngest. The Alberta death certificates state that the cause of death for the five-month old boy, Fletcher, was diphtheria and bronchitis, while the three-year old boy, Leslie, and the five-year old girl, Vera, died of diphtheria and heart failure. The oldest boy, Wellington, died of rheumatism and heart failure at the age of 11 years and 7 months.
“...the few spruce trees near the railroad track and close to the road mark the graves of those four who died during the fall of 1906 and spring of 1907, as the Village of Crossfield did not have a cemetery at that early date,” the journal stated. The family later moved to B.C., where Walters found one of the direct family members still living today. That family member thanked the group for their work in honouring those members of her family she just learned about.
While this was the first gravesite cleanup project for the Crossfield Gravesite Guardians, Turner and Walters voiced they are open to doing more projects.
“This has been such a great experience,” Turner said. “I'm a lover of history and I love being able to give back my time and I know others in the group do as well.”
She said these four children deserve to be remembered and hopes cleaning up the gravesite does a little bit of that.
With Crossfield sitting along the Calgary to Edmonton trail, she added there might be more gravesites in the area before a graveyard was established. If someone has a burial site on their property, Turner said the group would love to help re-establish it.
Walters added there used to be a staging area where a few people are also buried along the route between Calgary and Edmonton. She is also in search of a map that marks out gravesites on people’s properties, some which landowners might not even know about.
