Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery
Front entrance, Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges
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| Details | |
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| Established | 1854 |
| Location | 4601, chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3V 1E7 |
| Type | originally Roman Catholic, open to Christian burials |
| Size | 343 acres (139 ha) |
| No. of graves | 65,000+ |
| No. of interments | 1 million |
| Website | Official website |
| Designated | 1999 |
Founded in 1854, Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges is a 343-acre (139 ha) cemetery located in the borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 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 and the third-largest in North America.
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 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. It is now open to any Christian, though it continues to be a Catholic institution and serve a primarily Catholic community. (There are also two Jewish cemeteries adjoining it on Mount Royal.) Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Orthodox Greek, Polish, Ukrainian and Huron are also represented, indicated in many instances by ethnic motifs on gravestones. The cemetery shares the mountain with the predominantly English-speaking and originally Protestant adjacent burial ground, the Mount Royal Cemetery. These two abutting cemeteries on the slopes of Mount Royal contain a total of 1.5 million burials.
"La Pietà Mausoleum" contains a life-sized marble reproduction of Michelangelo's Pietà sculpture (original located in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican). Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1998 and plaqued in 2004.
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Wikipedia