Pelham Hicksite Quaker Cemetery in Pelham, Ontario

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Get directions Effingham Street and Welland Street
Pelham, Niagara Regional Municipality, Ontario Canada

Coordinates: 43.02453, -79.31019
Cemetery ID:

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At the corner of Welland Road and Effingham Street sits a little cemetery, a lonely reminder of a community that first settled Pelham prior to the 1800s. The Quakers, or Society of Friends, began arriving in Pelham as early as 1786.

They were invited and welcomed to Upper Canada by Lieutenant-Governor General John Graves Simcoe because of their qualities of honesty and hard work, as well as a sense of community, which would be of great benefit to those braving a new life in the wilderness.

The Pelham Society of Friends built their first meeting house in the late 1780s. The original building was a log structure located at the corner of Welland Road and Effingham Street. It was replaced with a larger frame building in 1807. In 1875 the Friends, now known as the Hicksite Quakers, built a new meeting house or church known as "The White Meeting House" at the same location. This also became the site of one of the earliest burial grounds for Friends.

In 1929, many years after it closed, The White Meeting House was moved to Maple Street in Fenwick where it still stands today. A tablet in the Welland Road cemetery now marks the spot where in the late 1700s the first monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends was established in Canada and where the Meeting House once stood.

One stone, bearing the name Page, is dated 1836. Among the early Quaker pioneer families to be found interred here are Willson, Beckett, Chapman, Page and Cohoe to name but a few.

Source: The Voice Of Pelham Aug 31, 2017

One stone, bearing the name Page, is dated 1836. Among the early Quaker pioneer families to be found interred here are Willson, Beckett, Chapman, Page and Cohoe to name but a few.

Source: The Voice Of Pelham Aug 31, 2017