Columbia Cemetery - Rossland, British Columbia - British Columbia Heritage Markers on Waymarking.com

The Columbia Cemetery was established in 1899 as the City of Rossland Cemetery and served the community until it was virtually abandoned in the 1960's with no further burials occurring there and very little upkeep being done.

The Columbia Cemetery is also known as City of Rossland Cemetery, and the Sunnyside Cemetery. There are approximately 960 known interments.

In the 1980's a four year restoration program was undertaken by the City to bring the cemetery back to a state where people could walk around in it and find graves. The Columbia Cemetery was officially closed in 1985.

In 2009, the newly created Heritage Commission began a new project to restore the cemetery with better access, signage and mapping.

This is a wonderful old cemetery and has many interesting gravestones.

COLUMBIA CEMETERY
The Columbia Cemetery was established in 1899. It was not the first cemetery in Rossland, in 1895 the Catholic Calvary Cemetery was established on the Wagon Road to Trail. There were also two other common cemeteries just outside the original townsite of Rossland called Laurel Hill and Sunnyside located in what is today, the north eastern part of the City.

The gold mining camp of Rossland expanded quickly after 1894 and by the time of its incorporation in 1897 the population had reached 7,000. The original common cemeteries were seen to perhaps be not large enough and they also were surrounded by and getting in the way of development.

In 1898, the City purchased 80 acres to land in Happy Valley for parkland and a new cemetery on 10 of those acres. The dedicated road access, called Park Street was obtained from the Nelson and Fort Sheppard Railway Company’s land grant. The City Engineer, Henry Smith submitted a design for the Cemetery. After 1899, no burials occurred in either the Laurel Hill or Sunnyside cemeteries and every attempt was made by the City in the early 1900s to transfer the remains they contained to the new Columbia Cemetery.

The layout of the Columbia Cemetery was generally adhered to thought the years of burials although many of the Blocks were never used. Documentation on the Columbia Cemetery is kept in the Museum Archives and includes the 890 burial permits issued by the City and a map done in 1963 to mark the location of occupied grave sites. Amongst other information, the burial permits tell us that 79 remains were transferred from earlier cemeteries and locations and the remains of 17 Chinese were disinterred on four separate occasions to be returned to China.

The Columbia Cemetery was used for over 70 years with the last recorded burial in 1971. The Cemetery was officially closed in July of 1985.
From the Sign at the cemetery