Cemetery

Erb Street Church Cemetery

407 Erb Street West, Waterloo
South-East corner of Erb Street and Fischer-Hallman Road

The 1851 deed for two roods of land (one half acre) sold to the church for seven pounds ten shillings by David and Elizabeth Eby stated that the land was to be used for a “meeting house and burying ground.” In 1880, David and Elizabeth’s son, David B., and his wife Lydia (Bowman) Eby sold an additional acre adjoining the original property for one hundred dollars.

After the new church was built closer to town in 1902, only the cemetery remained. It was on the usual route that church members used to drive into town and so they often passed by.

Now surrounded by the city which expanded especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the cemetery is an oasis in the midst of noisy traffic and busy malls. That small parcel of land is all that remains to suggest something of the pastoral crossroads of 1851, a time when the setting thereabouts was acre upon acre of cultivated fields, a few farm buildings, woodlots, and a new brick meetinghouse.

 Erb Street Mennonite Church continues to maintain the cemetery, which is used primarily by members and adherents of Erb Street Mennonite Church but is available to those attending other Mennonite churches as well.

Who is buried in the cemetery?

The Erb Street Mennonite Church Anniversary Cemetery Walk from 2001 can be downloaded and printed in either booklet or non-booklet form and you can guide yourself around a few highlights of the cemetery.  The signposts are no longer mounted, but the map included will guide you.

In 1989 the Waterloo Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society compiled a CD transcription of the cemetery stones.

A History Panel mounted along Erb Street acknowledges the location of the cemetery on the Haldimand Tract and its history in this place.