The Town of Irricana is embarking on a project to revitalize and beautify the community’s cemetery.
Coun. Jim Bryson said the idea to clean up the graveyard came to him after he visited the site on Father’s Day.
“I went up to the cemetery and noticed one family had gone and cleaned up around the headstones of their departed,” Bryson said. “But the rest of the cemetery looked kind of shabby – I decided we should do something about this.”
At a Sept. 21 meeting, Irricana Town council approved the formation of a new committee to oversee the rehabilitation of the site, which is located on the southern edge of town. The cemetery is more than 100 years old, and according to Bryson – who will now act as council liaison for the new Irricana Cemetery Revitalization Committee – the oldest headstone is from 1911.
One idea to remediate the area is removing an island of aging poplars in the middle of the cemetery, Bryson said, and potentially replacing the trees with a mausoleum.
“We just want to clean it up and make it more easily maintained in the future, so it will stay maintained,” he said.
“There are a lot of trees we have to try to get rid of and kill the roots because you never dig a grave with all the roots.”
Bryson said another issue in the cemetery that needs to be rectified is the Town’s record of who is buried where.
In order to verify the accuracy of the cemetery’s records, Bryson said the Town retained a company to use ground-penetrating radar, which revealed multiple anomalies below the surface.
“We found all kinds of interesting things – there are eight bodies that there are no records of, [and] bodies where they’re not supposed to be, where there were originally no plots,” he said.
Ted Coffey, the Town’s Chief Administrative Officer, said the municipality is now working to see if the cemetery’s records can be amended to be more accurate. He said the investigation will involve plenty of sleuthing, such as contacting the companies that made tombstones and combing through the Town’s own records, as well as using websites like ancestry.com
“We found one tombstone that the radar said there was no body under, and then we found a body with no tombstone,” he said. “There was another occasion where the same person who died on the same day has two tombstones 20 feet apart.”
According to Coffey, 127 people are buried in the Irricana cemetery.
“We can possibly clear up some of this,” he said. “Can we solve all the mysteries? Probably not.”
According to Coffey, the new committee will eventually come to council with a funding request for whatever remediation they determine should occur. He said the budget for that is uncertain at the moment, though added the Town spent approximately $2,000 to commission the ground-penetrating radar.
“But we’ve been investigating and there are year-round grants specifically for the rehabilitation of cemeteries,” he said. “Some are matching grants, while some are outright gifts. We’re currently investigating that.”
Whatever the cost ends up being, Bryson said Irricana residents have been receptive to the idea of cleaning up the cemetery.
“It will be a lot of volunteer work, but so far, we’ve had extremely positive comments from residents, which is a good thing,” he said, adding remediation would likely take a few years to complete.
“The people we’ve talked to and who have stopped at the cemetery with us have had very positive comments about what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Scott Strasser, AirdrieToday.com
Follow me on Twitter @scottstrasser19
