Keewatin Cemetery

St. Louis parishioners appeal for heritage funding to preserve Keewatin Cemetery

By Shirley Sandrel

Of the Enterprise

First published June 11, 2000

Reprinted with permission

George Meek remembers clearing brush and grass alongside Father Laliberte at the old Keewatin Cemetery. “Father had one of those big scythes,” says Meek, making a sweeping motion in imitation of the priest. “He had wavy hair and he greased it down with Bryl-Creem. Then he’d get working and it would all pop up.”

That was back in the 1930s. Meek says Laliberte would regularly bring out a group of boys from the parish (including George and his brother) to cut back the growth and clean up brush at the dormant graveyard.

Around that time, the Keewatin Bridge was under construction. When workers were about to dispose of a test mold they had poured for an abutment (by throwing it in the lake), Tommy Dempster stepped in.

Dempster was mayor of Keewatin then. He asked for and received permission to move the abutment to the cemetery grounds to stand as a marker. Once it was moved (by boat and horse team), a concrete cross was added to the top. Dempster scrawled his name and the date (1938) in the fresh concrete base and although the letters are worn, they are still visible today.

Meek says the cemetery was looked after until the war years when it was largely forgotten. Since that time, the legacy of the cemetery and the pioneers buried there has been in danger of being lost forever.

Meek found his attention turning back to the cemetery when he read an article on it in the local media. “It brought back memories from when we were kids,” says Meek. So, Meek started going out to try to reclaim the property from a half century of overgrowth. He was soon joined by other like-minded people, including Chuck Degagne.

Degagne has a personal connection with the cemetery. He says that his grandmother who came to the area when it was still known as Rat Portage has 12 children, one of whom died within a day of being born. “He may be in there,” says Degagne. And in the handwritten record of those interred there is a one-day old boy named Charles Degagne who is listed as having been buried Nov., 16^th, 1907.

In total, 19 people, most of them children, are known to be buried in the Keewatin Cemetery. There is speculation that four more people may be resting there, but the records aren’t clear.

What we do know is the cemetery represents, in the words of Monsignor Roger Bazin of St. Louis Parish, the last footsteps of those who opened up the area.

“Those are people who were pioneers,” says Bazin and it is on that basis that the St. Louis Parish has applied for Heritage funding to preserve the graveyard. City Councillor Ted Szajewski, who has also been involved in the process, says they sent in a revised application two weeks ago. Szajewski says they’re still waiting for word and he hopes to have the decision by the end of the month.