The popular cemetery strolls featured a guest performer playing a role that mirrors his day job.
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Mayor Darrin Canniff portrayed Chatham’s first mayor, Alexander Douglas McLean, while standing by McLean’s grave in Maple Leaf Cemetery Oct. 27. A repeat Cemetery Stroll performance on Oct. 28 was sold out.
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“It has been a fun, great experience,” Canniff said.
He praised the organizers, Ghost Walks of Chatham-Kent, for the long-running strolls highlighting interesting figures from Chatham-Kent’s history.
Canniff learned about McLean through Dr. Bruce Warwick, a founder of the Chatham-Kent Cemetery Restoration Project volunteer group, who spearheaded an August effort to place a headstone on McLean’s grave, which had been unmarked for 155 years.
Warwick had heard stories of Chatham’s first mayor, a Montreal native who came to Chatham in 1842 to open a law practice.
McLean died at Chatham in 1868, not long after serving as Chatham’s first mayor in 1855-56, Warwick learned. He was buried in the old St. Paul’s cemetery on Water Street in Chatham, but in 1880, the E&H Railway announced it was running tracks through the graveyard.
Warwick’s research found McLean’s son, AD McLean Jr., traveled to Chatham from Montreal to buy a grave in Maple Leaf Cemetery and have his father’s remains moved to lot No. 523 on Aug. 16, 1881.
But somehow a stone was never placed on the grave, until this past summer.
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