Cemeteries and Burial Grounds
St. Camillus Roman Catholic Cemetery, Farrelton
From A Place Apart by Norma Geggie, 1999:
The settlement of the Gatineau Valley seems in some respects to have been a transplantation of the Irish. There were, of course also Scots, English, New Englanders, and to the west, French from Lower Canada. However, of the original settlers in the Townships of Wakefield and Low, most were indeed Irish, and of those, the majority again, Catholic Irish. Understandably, they remained grouped in settlements, and whereas the Northern Irish Protestants gathered near Wakefield Village and Rupert, further north in the township the majority of the population was made up of Roman Catholics from Ireland.
In this northerly part of the township a log chapel was built on land donated in the early 1830s by Samuel Lord, a lumber merchant. It was not until 1859 that the stone church of Saint-Joseph-de-Wakefield was erected.
The name of the church was changed to St. Camillus some time during the 1860s. This was during the pastorate of Reverend Camillus Gay. Once the railway came through in the 1890s, the name of North Wakefield dropped in favour of Farrelton, to honour the Farrell family of pioneers.
The church was replaced in subsequent years, and a large cemetery stands nearby, a mixture of old and recent headstones.
The older areas of this cemetery in time became very overgrown and neglected and, in an overly zealous effort to remedy this, some early headstones were pushed into the river with the debris.
The cemetery for St. Camillus Church now is very well tended.
The earliest burial, that of Thomas Carroll, was registered in June 8, 1857. The children of Patrick Mason and Mary Plunkett are also amongst the early burials; James C. in 1858 and Josephine in 1860. Other names of original families are represented in Daly, Plunkett, Kelly, McGoey, Cahill, and Mahoney.
A headstone of note is that of Clarissa, a native of Briançon, France, the Rev. Camillus Gay's sister, who died November 23, 1873. Was she visiting, or had she come to keep house for her brother in his distant posting?
Additional resources:
List of Gatineau Valley Cemeteries.