Guelph Politicast

If you want to know the history of a place, go to the cemetery, and this is no less true for Woodlawn Memorial Park. It’s natural in this Halloween month to seek out some spookiness, and conventional wisdom says that there’s nowhere spookier than the local cemetery, but our guest this week spent a lifetime promoting a simple message: Your local cemetery is not a very scary place. Woodlawn Cemetery opened in 1854, and at the time it was at a location that was well beyond the Guelph city limits. This was purposeful because in 1853, Guelph passed a bylaw that said you couldn’t have a cemetery in the city limits, which at the time affected three cemeteries in the core including the Union located along Baker Street parking. We know the end of that story 160 years later. In all that time, the story of so many Guelphites ended at Woodlawn, and for 44 years that meant it ended at Paul Taylor. As a young man he brought is experience in construction to his first job at the cemetery where he was, of all things, a grave