Uncovering Burnaby: What's the story behind this Burnaby cemetery?

Upon first glance, Burnaby’s Ocean View Burial Park may look a bit spooky, with its expansive grounds, and eerie quietness.

But this cemetery is home to some very interesting local history, spanning back to the early 20th century.

The Ocean View Cemetery Company purchased the 40-acre site, located at 4000 Imperial St., in 1918, and opened for its first interments shortly after 1919.

Ocean View “offered a place for burials that was not owned or associated with a civic government, religious or fraternal organization,” notes Heritage Burnaby. It was the first non-sectarian cemetery created as a for-profit business in the province.

The design element of the cemetery was created by Albert F. Arnold, an officer of the Canadian Financiers Trust Company.

His vision for the cemetery was to make make it a place that wasn’t grim. In fact, Arnold was “... always depressed by the lack of beauty in so many places of interment and inevitable neglect that finally reduced them to long places of unhappy memories,” states Heritage Burnaby.

Arnold’s designs included landscaping elements such as ornamental trees, shrubs and flowerbeds. This was “a total absence of the usual somewhat ostentatious reminders of the harvest garnered by the grim reaper,” wrote one newspaper, describing his style as “romantic and sentimental.”

The expansive cemetery grounds have several important structures, such as the Abbey Mausoleum, which is a resting place for public figures such as Klondike Kate (Kathrine Ryan), a Northern Frontier heroine, and Canadian champion boxer Tommy Burns.

The Abbey Mausoleum was designed in 1928 by Wallace H. Hubbert, a San Francisco-based architect.

It was planned to be much larger, but, as Heritage Burnaby notes, only one wing was completed before the Great Depression hit and stopped further construction.

Hubbert’s expertise was in designing mausoleums and he described the buildings as “a monument to the community depicting its progress, telling the story of its individuals and the community to posterity.”

Work on the Ocean View property continued during the 1950s, and after the Second World War the cemetery grew as “additions were made to the Mausoleum in 1946-47, and again in 1954-55 in the modern style. Further additions were completed in 1974,” according to Heritage Burnaby.

The cemetery also plays a significant role in Burnaby’s Chinese history. As historian Maurice Guibord highlighted in this 2016 CBC piece, Ocean View was segregated and had separate burial areas for people of colour.

Won Alexander Cumyow, the first Chinese man born in Canada, was buried in the cemetery’s Willow section (which was reserved for people of colour). Cumyow was a community leader and knew several languages, allowing him to use those skills to work as a court interpreter for the Vancouver Police Department. He died in 1955, at the age of 94.

The cemetery also had a mausoleum built for the Chinese community to allow the remains of families and ancestors to rest together.

Guibord explained that many Chinese people had their cremated remains sent back to mainland China so their final resting places would be with their ancestors, but this eventually came to a halt during Mao Zedong’s rule.

Today, there are more than 100,000 people laid to rest at the cemetery and the site spans 100 acres, according to Ocean View’s website.

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