Cambridge‘s Garden Cemetery
by David Menary
Mount View Cemetery, off Blenheim Road, was designed by the English-born and raised landscape gardener Henry Wyatt between 1869-70. Wyatt was engaged by the town of Galt to design a “garden cemetery,” on the heavily-treed lot in an area west of town known as Dickson’s Bush.
Today it’s an area that has remained largely unchanged in general appearance for more than 100 years.
The cemetery and mausoleum contain some of Galt's most prominent early residents, as does the adjacent Trinity Anglican Cemetery, which can be accessed off Blenheim Road.
The city has an impressive pedigree of the wealthy and notable, with connections to the Seagrams, the Wilks and Astors of New York, and to the Masseys of Toronto, among others. This elite, which included the Dickson family, was responsible for what is now the West Galt heritage district known as Dickson Hill, and its two west-side cemeteries and Victoria Park, which collectively staked out a Victorian-era green belt that held firm when the city grew around it.
Syl Apps and Millicent Milroy
Two of the most visited gravestones at Mount View are those of Toronto Maple Leaf legend Syl Apps and schoolteacher Milicent Miroy.
Apps’ roots in nearby Paris, and indeed, in Galt, where his grandparents--the Wrigleys--lived, go deep; he returned to familiar territory in the late fall of 1936 when he was invited to his first Toronto Maple Leaf training camp in this southwestern Ontario city. As a by he atended many a Terrier ball game at Dickson Park.
Two years earlier, in 1934, the Leafs held their training camp in Preston (dryland) and Galt (on ice). They stayed at the Preston Springs Hotel (formerly the Hotel Del Monte).
Years later Apps and his wife were buried in the family plot at Mount View, but in the years between his first training camp and 1998, when he died, Apps carved out one of hockeys most legendary NHL careers.
Millicent Milroy
Not far from the Apps grave is that if Millicent Millroy. Her gravestone holds the distinction of being the most-visited grave at the cemetery. She was a single schoolteacher when she was purported to have met the visiting Edward, Prince of Wales in 1919.
Mount View's stories are both factual and fictional, as Milroy's stone reveals. On her stone is an inscription saying she was the wife of Edward, later the King of England until his abdication to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Milroy was a single and attractive young schoolteacher when Edward officially visited Galt in 1919. She claimed to have had a tryst in 1919—resulting in a secret marriage—with the Duke of Windsor. At her death, Alan Ferris of the Guelph Daily Mercury (Oct. 16, 1985) wrote: "Area woman takes answer to mystery with her to grave." Milroy, who died in 1985 at 95, was born at Galt and claimed her secret marriage took place in Western Canada. A respected schoolteacher for 35 years, she was described as private and quiet.
Edward, described by the Galt Reporter as “having a reputation as a man of the world,” was a well-known ladies' man, whose trysts have become the stuff of legend. But there is no documented proof that the two ever married. Years ago, when I worked for the Cambridge Reporter, the newspaper had a room called "The Morgue," where past issues of the paper going back to its beginning, were housed. The room also held important photographs, including, according to the late Bob Green, himself a former reporter at the paper, a photograph showing the prince in Galt on October 24, 1919 laying the cornerstone of the GWVA Memorial Home on Ainslie Street. At the far end of the photograph was Millicent Milroy, the only known evidence that can place the two at the same place and time. That building is now part of the Royal Canadian Legion, Galt Branch 121.
James Warnock
When Prince Edward visited Galt during his royal tour of Canada in the fall of 1919, the Reporter noted how popular he was with women. One of those women, the quiet, respectable schoolteacher Millicent Milroy, went to her grave believing her relationship with the man who would one day be king for 11 months, was more than a mere fling.
Both Mount View and Trinity offer insight into Galt's history. At Trinity can be found town co-founder Absalom Shade's grave, as well as the Dickson family plot, where William Dickson's granddaughter Florence, is buried, among other members of the family. Florence was largely responsible for the layout and character of the Dickson Hill subdivision. Unlike Shade, William Dickson is buried at St. Mark's Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he lived most of his adult life.
Trinity is more of a traditional church cemetery, though situated not beside the church but within easy walking distance. Mount View was Galt's answer to the growing proliferation of Garden cemeteries, where layout, landscaping and gardening were important so that visitors could reflect on the departed in an appealing setting.
Wyatt, the man town councillor James Warnock selected to head the creation of the town's new cemetery, was from an esteemed English family noted for their background in architectural and landscape gardening. By the 1860s Wyatt was living in what is now present-day Burlington.
James Warnock
Warnock, one of Galt's leading citizens and father of writer Amelia Beers Warnock—she wrote under the pen name Katherine Hale—was one of Galt's leading citizens and the owner of a thriving hardware business and a large textile manufacturing company; with Wyatt, he was the man responsible for Mount View Cemetery, as well as the avenue of trees leading to both cemeteries, lining Blenheim Road.
Just as one can walk through the years from Trinity to Mount View, experiencing cemetery evolution first-hand, a walk-through, within Mount View itself, reveals its evolution during the twenty-first century. The old section of Mount View shows its ties to the nineteenth century; the newer section to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Not far away, Dickson Park was named after its donor family, the Dicksons, while Shade contributed substantially to Trinity Anglican Church and cemetery, as did Katherine Langdon Wilks, a descendant of John Jacob Astor, and James Young, whose family donated the Young Memorial Chapel which straddles Trinity and Mount View Cemeteries.