The 2,500 residents of Pender Harbour now have a place to mount plaques for family and friends who have been cremated. The platform for the plaques is a slab of basalt stone in Forest View Cemetery. The Rotary Club of Pender Harbour Madeira Park contributed $2,000 to the project and a District Grant from The Rotary Foundation provided an additional $987 for purchase of the stone plus a memorial bench and pots for flowers.
Pender Harbour, on the Sunshine Coast of BC, is comprised of Madeira Park, Garden Bay and Egmont. Forest View Cemetery is located in Madeira Park, the central hub of the three communities with the greatest need for burial plots and cremation ash storage sites. Martha and Martin Warnock donated the cemetery in 1933 in memory of their young son, who was buried there. The Warnocks stipulated that it was to be kept in the family, so today the Warnocks’ grandchildren maintain the legally-sanctioned cemetery as trustees. But they say there is never enough money coming for maintenance.
Because the cemetery had been reaching capacity, the opportunity to inter ashes of loved ones following cremation led to the need for a place to mount the memorial plaques. Rotary responded to the request for this memorial display.
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Among the seven Rotarians involved in the project were Bill Charlton, Niels Frederiksen, Sean McAllister and Jon Paine who prepared the base and erected the memorial stone, and Kal Helyar, who was an organizer. The Pender Harbour Living Heritage Society and a group of volunteers worked with Rotarians to complete the project. Local resident Brenda Scoul was also among the leaders of the project.
Purchases for the project came from local businesses: Northwest Landscape Supply, Swansons Concrete, Home Depot and Rona.