Donald Cemetery – The Golden Museum hosted a recent tour at the Donald Cemetery, Golden, BC, near the Rogers’ Pass.
History has well recorded the settlement activities that occurred in our part of the Columbia Valley in the 1880s, with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Part of that record includes the communities that sprang up along the railway, many, probably most, tied in one way or another to the railway.
One of those, and perhaps the one which might have been forecast to serve the railway and the area well into the next century and beyond, was the small but very thriving settlement of Donald.
After all, it was a railway divisional point, a place where the train crews and their families lived and commercial and cultural infrastructure was established. Divisional points were very small capital cities along the railway lines.
CPR track arrived in Donald in 1884, and from then until 1896, everything in Donald was on the upswing. The railway had a station with a telegraph office and indoor plumbing. It also had a roundhouse and workshops, 200 employees and a railway hospital to provide medical care.
However, that changed in 1896 when the railway announced it was moving the divisional point to Revelstoke. So, while Donald reached its growth climax in 1897, it was also the beginning of the end.
And an auspicious end it was. The community had several stores, two schools, a newspaper, hotels, saloons, and homes for five hundred people. The population included a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, a sheriff, 2 clergymen, and a jailer, among others.
And it had something else.
A cemetery.
Now, that might not seem to be such an important thing. But not all communities of the day had cemeteries. In the southern part of our valley, to this day, Invermere does not have a cemetery within its original boundary. Nor does Athalmer (now part of Invermere), nor Wilmer, nor Radium Hot Springs, nor Fairmont Hot Springs. Until about 1958, when the presently used cemetery (near Canadian Tire), was put into use, the only cemetery in that area for general use was at a picturesque location at Windermere, on the eastern side of Lake Windermere.
But Donald had its own.
With the announcement of the change in divisional points, those who had an interest in Donald, of course, started to leave. Many went to Revelstoke, the new divisional point. Several buildings were moved there. St. Peter’s Anglican Church was moved to Windermere. The Presbyterian Church went to Field. By March 1899, the government offices, the courthouse, and the jail had been moved to Golden.
In the coming years, most, if not all, of the buildings that had been in Donald to serve the railway and its attendant population were gone. And how do you move a cemetery?
The short answer, of course, is that you don’t move them. And it has not been moved. The only part of the original Donald community, the cemetery, is still there. Long neglected, it has recently received some care and refurbishment by local resident led by Denise Darbyshire.
New, white metal crosses have been erected by many gravesites, and pathways have been re-gravelled to mark their locations within the grounds.
Cemeteries are often considered to be depositories for those in our area who have passed away. But they are more than that. They are really part of the record, the historical record of an area. Lacking perhaps in specific details in most instances, they do present a unique perspective on the lives that people in the area lived in years past.
What, for example, other way would people in our area now learn of two children losing their lives to an incurable disease when their father was the local doctor? But the wooden marker in the Donald Cemetery tells the story, and it is, to this day, a record of the difficulties of the early days in our valley and perhaps, a record of the challenges of life in the early years everywhere.
The wooden grave markers are now mostly illegible, and the fences that family members constructed years ago have either fallen or are at least in serious disrepair. Trees surround the cemetery border and, in some instances, have grown in the cemetery itself. But one predominant feature of this reminder of the past is the stillness, the quietness of this special piece of ground.
The stillness, however, disappears quickly with the sound of an approaching train, and as one moves past, there is a clear distinctness in the comparison between years past and the present. A twelve-car train, pulled by a black steam engine in the late 1800s, has now been replaced by trains a mile long, in most cases probably carrying resource products such as coal and potash rather than passengers and small farm and lumber shipments a century ago.
Access to the cemetery is, unfortunately, not great. An appropriately named road, the Donald Cemetery Road, takes off from the Trans-Canada Highway, just before the bridge over the Columbia River, but there is no legal access right to the cemetery, and, understandably, the CPR does not want pedestrians crossing their tracks to enter the cemetery. Access from the eastern side can only be made through private property, which means obtaining permission and navigating some unmarked trails.
On October 22, the Golden Museum and its director, Brittany Newman, sponsored a well-attended tour of the Donald Cemetery. It was a very special opportunity to visit one of the most authentic historical resources that we have in our area, and in a setting still bordering the CPR mainline right-of-way, a transportation utility which brought British Columbia into confederation, and still continues to be a major economic artery in our province and in Canada.
