Old St. John's Cemetery

Old St. John's Cemetery is a tree-shaded historic burial ground at the center of Kingsport, at once a local landmark and a quiet refuge from the busy city around it. Its weathered stones preserve fragments of individual lives, while its monumental entrance and memorial to soldiers fallen in the Crimean War connect the town's intimate histories to a wider past. For Anne Shirley, the cemetery becomes more than a sight: it is a place to wander, think, and make a new acquaintance.

Setting and Historic Character

Kingsport carries the marks of successive periods: once a frontier station beside the wilderness, it later became contested between the British and French. Historic relics remain scattered through the town, including a martello tower in the park, a dismantled French fort on the hills, and old cannon in public squares. Old St. John's belongs to this larger historical landscape, but its location gives it a distinctive character. It lies at the town's core, between quiet streets lined with old houses on two sides and busy modern thoroughfares on the others. The contrast makes the cemetery neither wholly removed from civic life nor swallowed by it; traffic continues nearby, while the grounds retain a palpable quiet.

A high stone wall encloses the cemetery, and rows of elms and willows surround and cross its grounds. The trees shade the graves and soften the noise beyond them. The cemetery is described as very full and bowery, a place where leaves and wind seem to keep watch over the sleepers. The setting's appeal comes from this meeting of human history and natural shelter: the trees do not erase the graveyard's purpose, but lend it a contemplative stillness.

Stones, Inscriptions, and Memorials

The old tombstones are distinctive less for polished artistry than for their variety, age, and evidence of wear. Most are roughly chiselled from brown or gray native stone, with little ornament; some bear skulls and crossbones, sometimes paired with a cherub's head. Many have fallen or lie in ruins. Time has worn away some inscriptions altogether and made others difficult to decipher. Their damaged surfaces leave history partly visible and partly lost, so that the cemetery's record is made up of both surviving testimony and gaps.

The stones commemorate different kinds of attachment and loss. Anne reads an inscription honoring Alexander Ross, who died in 1840 at the age of forty-three. It records that the person who raised the stone had served him faithfully for twenty-seven years and had been regarded as a friend deserving trust and affection. Anne responds to the emphasis on faithful service, seeing it as a sufficient account of a life. Nearby, one small gray stone remembers a favorite child; another marks someone buried elsewhere, leaving the location of that unknown grave unresolved. Such brief, uneven records make the cemetery's history personal rather than merely chronological.

The entrance offers a more public form of remembrance. A massive stone arch is surmounted by the great lion of England, and opposite the gates stands a monument to Nova Scotian soldiers who fell in the Crimean War. The monument had been erected only a few years before the events of the story. Set among older local graves, it brings the memory of distant military deaths into the same grounds as family epitaphs and unrecorded private grief.

A Public Landmark and a Place of Refuge

The cemetery is no longer used for burials, yet it has not become an abandoned or inaccessible space. It is one of Kingsport's recognized sights, and citizens feel a possessive pride in it; many can claim an ancestor resting there beneath a crooked slab that records the principal facts of that person's life. The town's relation to the place therefore joins public identity to family memory. Its importance rests not on active funerals but on the accumulation of generations, inscriptions, and local associations.

Priscilla Grant introduces the cemetery to Anne as a place she has already explored for pleasure, emphasizing its trees, old tombstones, and room for the imagination. Anne initially finds the view from her room across the street gruesome and says she would prefer looking onto a backyard. She soon changes her mind. After registering as a student at Redmond with Priscilla, she seeks out the cemetery because she wants trees and hopes to imagine herself in the woods of Green Gables. Instead, the grounds hold her attention: she reads the inscriptions, reflects on what they say about the dead, and decides she will return often. The visit turns an unfamiliar city's graveyard into a place she already loves.

Meetings and Narrative Significance

Anne and Priscilla enter past the stone arch and lion, then follow the cemetery's avenues among the graves. The place's quiet makes a contrast with the crowds of strangers at Redmond, where the students have felt out of place. At the cemetery they notice a young woman sitting on a gray slab beneath an enormous willow. Priscilla recognizes her as someone they saw at the college that morning: the stranger has repeatedly started up the avenue toward them and turned back. Priscilla suggests that it may be easier to become acquainted in a graveyard than at Redmond, and the two walk toward her.

The encounter shows how the cemetery operates within the story as both landscape and social setting. Its paths offer room for solitary attention, but they also provide a less intimidating route toward meeting someone new. Anne had expected to use the trees as a substitute for the Avonlea woods; instead, the cemetery's inscriptions and its living visitor draw her into the present. The place thus connects reflection on past lives with the beginning of a new friendship, making its stillness a setting for movement rather than withdrawal.