YORKTON, Sask. — Beneath colourful fall leaves and under a crisp autumn sky, residents gathered at Yorkton Memorial Gardens Cemetery to explore more than a century of local history during Randy Goulden's annual Culture Days walking tour.
The tour offered a glimpse into the lives, achievements and hardships of some of Yorkton's earliest residents, weaving together stories of success, tragedy and community legacy preserved among the cemetery's nearly 12,000 interments.
Goulden said the cemetery serves as a history book of the community, with each gravesite helping tell the story of Yorkton's past.
"What I find so fascinating and interesting is the history in here," she said.
Moving among weathered marble headstones and modern grave markers, Goulden pointed to the ways burial practices, memorial styles and community traditions have changed over the decades.
"The change in the money, the change in the look and the feel of how people remember," she said.
The contrast between old and new is particularly striking throughout the cemetery. Timeworn headstones from the early 1900s stand beside modern monuments, while elaborate memorials share space with more modest markers.
The cemetery itself holds pieces of Yorkton's earliest history. Goulden explained the current site was not the city's first cemetery.
"The original site was on Agricultural Avenue," she said. "When the city started to grow, they moved all the interments here."
According to Goulden, the first interment at the current cemetery took place in 1896. The oldest grave marker commemorates a child who died in 1891 and was later moved to the current cemetery from the original burial ground on Agricultural Avenue in 1897.
Among the most prominent gravesites on the tour is that of Levi Beck and his wife, Harriet Jane Alice Beck.
Known as the "Merchant Prince of Yorkton," Beck built a business empire that included a boarding house, grist mill, implement dealership, butcher shop, harness shop, confectionery, bakery, lumberyard, general store and grain elevators in both Yorkton and Otthon. He even issued his own merchant tokens that could be used in his stores.
While Levi became known as the "Merchant Prince of Yorkton," Harriet was equally hardworking, helping manage the family's many business ventures as the couple built one of Yorkton's early entrepreneurial success stories.
A descendant, Ruth Smith, described Levi and Harriet Beck in The City of Yorkton Cemetery Walking Tour Guide as a "loving and devoted couple."
Not far away lies another notable pioneer, John "Jack" Hole, owner of Yorkton's first John Deere dealership.
His historic gravesite is marked by a huge stone cross and bordered with stone edging, reflecting the prosperity he enjoyed during his lifetime. Yet the story recorded in The City of Yorkton Cemetery Walking Tour Guide reveals a far more complicated legacy.
Hole's obituary noted his fondness for socializing in local bars, while his wife Jane was remembered as a strong-willed woman who had no hesitation entering the beer parlour to retrieve her husband if she felt he had stayed too long. The guide recounts one story in which Hole drove their car into a slough and reportedly told Jane to "sit there and cool off."
Hole died by suicide and was survived by Jane for another 37 years.
If the stories of Yorkton's business leaders reflect the city's growth, the graves of the Mason children serve as a sobering reminder of the challenges faced by early settlers.
Their unique gravesite commemorates four siblings lost during childhood. Mary Mason died at just three months old. A few years later, sisters Eunice, Georgina and Dora all died within weeks of one another from scarlet fever, with the last death occurring on Christmas Day, 1897.
Standing before the small graves, visitors are reminded of an era when childhood illnesses frequently proved fatal. Today, scarlet fever, caused by the same bacteria responsible for strep throat, is readily treated with antibiotics. The contrast offers perspective on the advances in medicine and public health that many now take for granted.
The tour also highlighted the many notable figures buried at the cemetery, including former Saskatchewan lieutenant-governor Sylvia Fedoruk, community builders, doctors, clergy and civic leaders whose contributions helped shape Yorkton.
Goulden encouraged residents to spend time exploring the grounds and learning about the people buried there.
"If you walk around, you can see some really unique monuments that are not on the tour," she said. "This gives you some history and some of the arts and culture that happened in all of this."
While the sprawling grounds can feel daunting when searching for a loved one or person of interest, the City of Yorkton undertook the considerable task of digitally mapping the cemetery's gravesites.
Residents can now search for loved ones, friends or historical figures through the city's online cemetery database.
"That took a lot of work, as you can imagine," Goulden said.
More than a resting place, the cemetery stands as a record of Yorkton's history. From pioneering entrepreneurs and community builders to children lost too young, the monuments and markers preserve stories that might otherwise be forgotten, bringing the city's remarkable past to life for a new generation.
