Centreville Primitive Methodist Church Cemetery
Location:
16433 The Gore Road, Caledon, Peel Region, Ontario, Canada.
Concession 4, lot 23 W½, Albion Township.
GPS:
Latitude: 43.90721°N
Longitude: -79.84710°W
History:
“Field meetings ranked next to camp meetings in popularity on the Primitive Methodist Albion Circuit around the 1850’s. A farm wagon holding a few chairs for the preachers served as a platform, and the congregation sat on improvised benches fashioned of logs rolled into rows with planks on top. One such meeting, at which 600 people gathered in Squier’s farm field, sparked a movement to build the Centreville Methodist Meeting-house on part of the west half of Lot 23 Concession 4. Then and there [in 1863], William Squier donated half an acre from his homestead for a church and a burying ground, to be held in trust by Isaac Wilson, George Steer, Simon Elliott, Robert Tyndall and James Squier. [The deed was recorded as instrument 7321 in the Peel County land records.] The completed church, a frame building, was opened November 26, 1854 and sermons were preached morning and evening by Mrs Isaac Wilson. [In the beginning the church was known as Squier’s Chapel in the Primitive Methodist minutes and later it was known as Bethel.] Today all traces of this old church are gone, but the graves are still there, fenced against intrusion, their headstones bearing such pioneer names as CHEAVINS, SPINKS, CLARRIDGE, GRANT, SQUIER, WRAY, AGAR and KENNEDY.”
From The Story of Albion by Esther Heyes
(The Bolton Enterprise, Bolton, Ontario, 1961)
Transcription purchase:
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