The popular cemetery strolls featured a guest performer playing a role that is also his day-time job.
Article content
Mayor Darrin Canniff portrayed Chatham’s first mayor Alexander Douglas McLean Friday night while standing by McLean’s grave in Maple Leaf Cemetery. He is also slated to do a repeat performance Saturday night that is sold out.
Article content
“It has been a fun, great experience,” Canniff said.
He praised the organizers, Ghost Walks of Chatham-Kent, for their long-running event that highlights the many different and interesting people who are part of Chatham-Kent’s history.
Canniff learned about the McLean through Dr. Bruce Warwick, a founding member of the volunteer group Chatham-Kent Cemetery Restoration Project, who spearheaded an effort in August to have a headstone placed on McLean’s grave, which had been unmarked for 155 years.
Article content
Warwick had heard stories about Chatham’s first mayor, who was born in Montreal and came to Chatham in 1842 to open a law practice.
Warwick learned McLean died at Chatham in 1868, not long after serving as Chatham’s first mayor in 1855-56. McLean 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 middle of the graveyard.
Warwick’s research found McLean’s son, AD McLean Jr., traveled to Chatham from Montreal to purchase 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.
Share this article in your social network