History & Heritage

Before there was a village

The land here was white pine, and the pine was the reason anyone came. In the decades after Confederation the forests of Clarence Township were being cut for the British timber trade, and the crews that cut them needed somewhere to live.

The settlement that grew up was called North Indian, after the North Indian Creek that runs nearby — a name chosen to distinguish it from South Indian, further along the line, which is now Limoges. Descendants of Loyalist families from the St. Lawrence valley began taking up land here in the 1880s.

Miller, Armstrong, Price, Candiff, McLean, Butler, Cooper, Watson, Kinnaird. The first families to clear land at North Indian

Those names matter to this cemetery, because those were its first families. They were English-speaking and, almost to a household, Protestant. The nearest churches of their own denominations were a long drive by wagon, and the nearest consecrated ground belonged to a parish that was not theirs. So they made their own.

You can still read the arrangement in the landscape. The road the cemetery fronts is Butler Road. The Butlers were among the first arrivals.

The railway and the name

What turned a clearing into a village was J.R. Booth’s Canada Atlantic Railway. The line gave the timber a way out to Ottawa and on to England, and it gave the settlement a station — and, in time, a new name.

How the village came to be called Hammond is not settled. The most durable local account holds that the name belonged to one of the surveyors working on the railway, and that it was drawn out of a hat. It is the kind of story that may well be true, and there is no better one on offer.

Two communities, two burial grounds

From about 1880 a second wave of settlers arrived — the Carrières, the Éthiers, the Guindons and others — French-speaking and Catholic. For years those families travelled to neighbouring parishes for the sacraments. A building serving as chapel, school and hall went up in 1902; after a petition in 1911 the Parish of Saint-Mathieu was formally erected, and a brick church designed by Charles Brodeur was finished on 7 September 1912 and blessed the following January.

That is why a hamlet of this size has two cemeteries a short distance apart. The Roman Catholic cemetery of Saint-Mathieu serves the parish; this ground served everyone else. The division was denominational rather than unfriendly, and the two burial grounds have coexisted for well over a century.

A timeline

• 1870s–1880s

  Loyalist descendants from the St. Lawrence valley take up land at North Indian and begin clearing the pine.

• 1876

  The first public school is built.

• c. 1880

  French-Canadian families — Carrière, Éthier, Guindon and others — begin settling in the area.

• 1880s–1890s

  The Canada Atlantic Railway, owned by J.R. Booth, reaches the settlement. Timber moves out by rail; the village takes the name Hammond.

• 1895

  A post office opens at Hammond.

• 1902

  A multipurpose building serving as chapel, school and community hall is erected.

• 1911–1913

  The Parish of Saint-Mathieu is established. Its brick church is completed on 7 September 1912 and blessed on 12 January 1913.

• 1914 and 1941

  Two major fires sweep the village.

• 1948

  École Saint-Mathieu is built.

• 1 January 1998

  Clarence Township amalgamates with the Town of Rockland to form Clarence-Rockland. Hammond, and this cemetery, fall within the new municipality.

• 2017

  The cemetery is added to Find a Grave, beginning a systematic photographic record of the stones.

Reading the stones

Roughly 135 memorials have been documented here, and about 93 per cent of them have been photographed. That figure is a floor rather than a total. Nineteenth-century burial grounds in eastern Ontario are full of graves that were marked with wood, or with fieldstone, or never marked at all — and limestone and marble markers from the 1880s have been weathering in this climate for well over a hundred winters.

If you are researching a family here, please treat the visible stones as the beginning of the search and not the end of it. Our burial records page explains what we hold and how to ask us to check the register.

Sources. Settlement history, family names and village chronology from The French-Canadian Genealogist, “History of Hammond”. Cemetery location, survey description and memorial counts from Find a Grave and from the Ontario Genealogical Society’s Russell County cemetery transcriptions. Municipal history from the City of Clarence-Rockland. Corrections are welcome and will be credited.