Mount Hermon Cemetery is a garden (or rural) cemetery and National Historic Site of Canada. It is located in the Sillery district () of the Sainte-Foy–Sillery–Cap-Rouge borough () of Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The cemetery was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 2007.
The impetus for the creation of the cemetery was the need for the provision of an Anglican burying ground for Quebec City's primarily English language speaking, Anglican community, in the mid–1800s.
The cemetery is located at the corner of Saint-Louis Road () and côte de Sillery (formerly côte de l'Église), on of land overlooking the Saint Lawrence River, in the southeastern direction.
More than people are buried at Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon Cemetery draws distinction as being the first garden cemetery () established in Canada. Mount Hermon, and other garden cemeteries formed in North America, took inspiration from cimetière du Père-Lachaise of Paris.
A memorial was dedicated to the victims of the sinking of the shipwrecked Empress of Ireland, in 1914, and other memorials were erected at later dates on the cemetery's grounds. The major loss of lives aboard the shipwrecked Empress of Ireland had significant impact upon Mount Hermon, along with its neighboring cemetery on chemin Saint-Louis: Saint-Patrick's Cemetery, which also relocated from the city of Quebec, in 1879. Both of the cemeteries took on responsibility for a significant number of the ship's passengers whom perished aboard or at sea.
Separately, on the Mount Hermon grounds is the Treggett Bell, which was presented in gratitude to the Treggett family, who had members from four different generations of its family serve as Mount Hermon's Superintendents, encompassing the years 1865–2014.
In addition, the cemetery contains sections dedicated for individuals of Greek (), Chinese (), and Cambodian () descent.
The main entrance is accessed at 1801 Saint-Louis Road, at the northern end of the cemetery. There is a pedestrian entrance located at the southwestern portion of the cemetery, accessed at the northern terminus of avenue des Voiliers, one-block east of côte de Sillery. The cemetery grounds contain both paved and gravel roads.
Origins
In the spring of 1847, a group of Protestant businessmen, shipbuilders, merchants, and clergy convened a public meeting to determine the possibility of buying land for a rural cemetery. Quebec City's original Anglican cemetery, located adjacent to Saint Matthew's Church on Saint John Street () had reached its capacity and city officials requested that a new Protestant cemetery be established outside of the city limits.
With aid from the lumber merchant John Gilmour, a prominent member of the local Protestant community, as well as a member of first municipal council of Sillery, the Quebec Protestant Cemetery Association was formed on February 11, 1848. Its first president was George O'Kill Stuart, Jr., and its main objective was to collect the funds necessary to purchase land and establish a cemetery on it. Other founding members included the philanthropist Jeffery Hale and the physician Dr. James Douglas, the later whom served as a member of the cemetery's first board of directors in 1848.
On June 14, 1848, Christopher Ferguson, 42-years of age, who was the master of the brig Transit, died of erysipelas. He became the first person to be buried in the nascent cemetery and the first person to be recorded in the cemetery's burial register. The only other details recorded were that he was a member of the Church of England and that the officiating clergyman was the Rev. J. Cornwall.
The legislation (12 Vict., chap. 191) which legally incorporated the new cemetery was adopted by the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada on May 30, 1849. It was at that time that the new cemetery was officially given the name of Mount Hermon.
The membership of the association's first board of directors was noted for being an example of ecumenical cooperation in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic majority city and province of Quebec. Between June 1848 and December 1883, out of burials, close to half of the decedents were members of the Anglican Church (), followed by members of the Presbyterian Church (), and the Methodist Church (583).
Cemetery design
An American civil and military engineer, David Bates Douglass, designed the layout of Mount Hermon, in 1848. Douglass, who garnered acclamations for his 1838–1839 design of Green-Wood Cemetery, as a landscape of "bucolic serenity" in Brooklyn, New York, modeled both Albany Rural Cemetery (1845–1846), located on the outskirts of Albany, New York, and Mount Hermon Cemetery, after Green-Wood.