Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery
cemetery in Montreal
Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery (French: Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, pronounced [simtjɛʁ nɔtʁə dam de nɛʒ]) is a 139-hectare (340-acre) rural cemetery located in the borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which was founded in 1854. The entrance and the grounds run along a part of Côte-des-Neiges Road and up the slopes of Mount Royal. Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Canada by number of burials and the third-largest in North America.
History and description
Created on property purchased from Dr. Pierre Beaubien, the new cemetery was a response to growing demand at a time when the old Saint-Antoine Cemetery (near present-day Dorchester Square) had become too small to serve Montreal's rapidly increasing population. Founded in 1854 as a
garden cemetery in the French style, it was designed by landscape architect Henri-Maurice Perreault, who studied rural cemeteries in Boston and New York. On May 29, 1855, thirty-five-year-old Jane Gilroy McCready, wife of Thomas McCready, then a Montreal municipal councillor, was the first person to be buried in the new cemetery.
Notre Dame des Neiges is the largest cemetery in Canada with more than 55 kilometres (34 mi) of lanes and one million people interred. The Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery site has more than 65,000 monuments and 71 family vaults.
The cemetery originally served Roman Catholics and rural French Canadians.
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This entry incorporates text from “Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.