Buckley, Menzie and McMurray Families - Niagara Falls, Ontario ...

Postscript
Major Morton Buckley’s interest in Fairview Cemetery was both public and personal. As an
active citizen and businessman in the rapidly growing Town of Clifton in the 1860’s and 70’s,
he saw the need for a town cemetery apart from the cemeteries attached to local churches, such
Anglican churches as All Saints, St. Johns, Holy Trinity, and Drummond Hill and Stamford
Presbyterian where most citizens traditionally had been buried. Lundy’s Lane was a Methodist
Church cemetery until the Township of Stamford acquired it in 1934. His interest in this project
led to his appointment as Chairman of the Cemetery Committee in 1883 and the creation of
Fairview now 125 years ago.
Behind this public interest however were more personal ones. He wanted a burial place for
members of his large family where he could erect a monument appropriate for what he must have
seen as his status in the community. Erie Avenue in the Town of Clifton, after all had, for a time
been humorously labeled ‘Buckleyville’ as so many Buckley businesses were located there. So,
when the cemetery opened, he purchased a large lot just inside the old front gates. He had a
monument erected with a vault in front of appropriate size and had the family genealogy
inscribed on it. It looked directly down Bridge Street over open fields towards the growing Town
of Niagara Falls and ‘Park Villa’ his home on the river.
Ethel Rose and Charles Vandersluys
There was another reason even more personal known only to
a few, his desire to bring back the children Elizabeth and he
had lost and buried elsewhere, including Albert Edward
who died in 1859 far away in Philadelphia, and have them
buried with them in the family plot. John Herman died at
two in 1867 and Eli Philip in infancy in 1872, before
Fairview was opened. Ethel Rose, the grandchild they loved
most having raised her from childhood when her mother died, they could not get back. She died
in the great flu epidemic of 1918 in England waiting faithfully for her husband to come back
from the battlefields of the Great War. The epitaph on William Pitt’s grave written in 1887
speaks for all of these: “His sun set when it was yet day.”
-32-