MOST people wouldn’t realise that Millicent’s first cemetery isn’t the old section of the town’s cemetery on Mount Gambier Road.
The first cemetery was behind where Millicent’s hospital is and the location has been marked by a new plaque which was unveiled last Tuesday.
A combined effort by Wattle Range Council and the South East Family History Group (SEFHG), the project to have the plaque installed was driven by SEFHG President Noel Boyle.
Mr Boyle has undertaken extensive research to find details of who might be buried at the first cemetery, which was used between February 1873 and September 1877, as there were no burial records from that era.
For the unveiling, Mayor Des Noll did a Welcome to Country and praised Mr Boyle for his work on this and other projects in the area.
Mr Boyle and SEFHG Vice President, Kelvin Edlington who has relatives buried at the site, listed off names of people believed to be buried there.
SEFHG’s oldest member, Tom Telford who is in his 90’s and could recall walking through the cemetery as a child, helped Mr Boyle unveil the plaque.
Mr Boyle said he began the process of having the plaque installed two years ago.
“I am a lover of history and it is important to record this history before it is forgotten,” he said.
“Some of Millicent’s earliest pioneers would be buried here, it is important that this fact is recorded because most people wouldn’t realise that.”
With Millicent being established in 1870, the town was without a cemetery for a period and Mr Boyle’s research revealed that unknown graves were probably scattered around the town and surrounding area prior to the establishment of the first cemetery.
In the time that the first cemetery was opened, the plaque records that at least 34 children and 26 adults died in Millicent.
When the current cemetery was opened in 1877, some of the bodies were exhumed from the first cemetery and reburied in the new cemetery while other bodies were left at the old site.
The only remaining original evidence of the cemetery’s location is a headstone for James Nelson who was the only identified victim from the wreck of the ship the ‘Geltwood’ which came to grief off Canunda in 1876.
Even that headstone was removed to the new cemetery, then known as Mayurra cemetery, but it was returned in the 1980’s following an effort involving the late Bruce Towers who was also an avid local historian in Millicent.
At that time, Mr Towers also erected a Celtic Cross, next to the Geltwood headstone, to mark the area where three unknown sailors from the Geltwood were buried.
