History will come alive in this Sunday’s spirit walk at Glenwood

At last year’s event, Carlotta Rutledge told the story of Ekatrina-Pushkin.

See history come alive in Picton’s Glenwood Cemetery Sunday, June 19, in a spirit walk profiling 11 women of distinction who rest within its gates. Her Story, a walking tour presented in conjunction with the Prince Edward County Historical Society’s weekend event, Two Days About Yesterday, is a costumed walking tour featuring vocalists Julian Gallo (Wally Williamson), Lenni Stewart, Carol Quinn, Celine Papezewski and fiddler Luke Norton.

Organizers have announced special guest appearances by Queen Victoria (Carol Cooper Gorman) and Capt. John Pepper Downes (Don Roberts), leader of the walk. Glenwood board chair Sandra Latchford says tour participants are asked to register in advance at www.aboutyesterday.ca or tday@kos.net, if possible. Tickets for the event are $20, with all monies payable at the cemetery on the afternoon of the tour. The 90-minute walk will begin at 2 p.m. and follow a gentle loop beginning and ending at the chapel. Although there is no steep terrain, appropriate footwear is suggested.

Among the remarkable women who will be introduced to tour participants are Jeanne Minhinnick (Arlene Wright), a recipient of the Order of Canada, Cecilia Folkard, winner of the Dow Award for Heroism (Sandra Latchford), Dora Prinzen (Helma Oonk), a Dutch farm wife, who hid seven airmen from the Germans, during the Second World War, and Mary Dunkley (Eleanor Lindsay MacDonald), an early educator who taught the Three R’s at Picton’s Mary Street School for more than 40 years.

Also featured will be Cora Colden (Sandra Dowds), an early Glenwood superintendent and Canada’s first female cemeterian, columnist Carrie Cross Carter (Carol Cooper Gorman and Gillian Gorman), whose writings painted a unique picture of Picton in the early 1900s, and Letitia Youmans (Carol Quinn), temperance pioneer. Other celebrated women of distinction include Ekaterina Pushkin, (Celine Papezewski) who fled the Russian Revolution, World War l war correspondent, poet and naturalist, Anne Merrill (Lenni Stewart), her sister, Helen Merrill (Judith Zelmanovits, poet, naturalist and keeper of records, and World War 1 army nurse, Mabel Foster (Sandra Foreman).

Glenwood Cemetery is a Victorian City of the Dead, consecrated in 1873 by Rt. Rev. John Travers Lewis, Bishop of Ontario. Established in Queen Victoria’s reign, it is one of the most picturesque cemeteries in eastern Ontario.