Description of Historic Place

The First Anglican Cemetery and War Memorial Site is located directly off Main Road in Arnold’s Cove. The grassy fenced cemetery contains mainly white marble headstones and adjoins the community’s war memorial site, which features a white marble monument. The designation includes all land within the fence surrounding the cemetery, the monuments, grave markers and other physical features contained within, plus the adjoining war memorial monument area defined by the footprint of the monument itself and the wooden platform erected around it.

Heritage Value

The First Anglican Cemetery and War Memorial Site has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of Arnold’s Cove because of its spiritual, historic, social and aesthetic values.

The First Anglican Cemetery has spiritual value due to its association with the Anglican religion in Arnold’s Cove. The War Memorial has spiritual value as a physical manifestation of a tribute to Arnold's Cove war dead.

The cemetery has historic value as the town’s oldest known cemetery and because it was part of the first community infrastructure at Arnold’s Cove, which included a church, school and the cemetery circa 1888. Neither the church nor school remains today, but the cemetery was used for burials until the Second Anglican Cemetery was established in 1915, and occasionally after that. The First Anglican Cemetery remains on the landscape as a reminder of the community’s early years.

The cemetery also has historic value because its monuments and extant headstones contain historic and genealogical type information.

Jonathan Boutcher is credited with the leading role in the establishment of the first church, school and cemetery in Arnold’s Cove, and an inscribed bell from the former Anglican church has been erected at the First Anglican Cemetery as a monument to his efforts.

The community war memorial was erected in 1921, adjoins the cemetery at the entrance gateway, and enhances its significance. This marble monument has historic value because it stands on the former site of the community’s first Church of England church, and because it memorializes Arnold’s Cove’s veterans. It also has social value as a focal point of the community’s annual Remembrance Day ceremony, for which residents gather around this spot.

The First Anglican Cemetery has aesthetic value because its marble monuments and gravemarkers in tablet or column forms set in the grassy, fenced land evokes the nineteenth to early twentieth century period during which it was in use for burials. The style and white marble material of the war memorial monument is visually cohesive with the cemetery. Together, the cemetery and monument form a distinctive landscape feature in a very visible area along Arnold’s Cove’s main road, near the oceanside, in the historic heart of the community.

Source: Town of Arnold's Cove Regular Council Meeting Motion 145/2008 October 29, 2008.

Character-Defining Elements

Those elements which contribute to the site’s historic and aesthetic value, including:

-style, placement and materials of gravemarkers;
-style, placement and materials of other monuments, including the bell;
-inscriptions of gravemarkers and monuments;
-placement, inscription, style, and white marble material of the war memorial monument;
-grassy topography;
-existence of fencing to contain the site;
-and location of site.