Stavely Cemetery (Foothills County)

Stavely is a town on Highway 2, approximately 80 kilometres northwest of Lethbridge. It was originally known as Oxley, the same name as the Ranching Company that held the leases on vast tracts of the surrounding land in the 1880’s. Alexander Staveley Hill, from Wolverhampton, England, was the founder of the Oxley Ranching Company and the name of the community was eventually named in his honour.

In 1882, British Member of Parliament and judge advocate of the Fleet Alexander Staveley Hill, Q.C. (1825-1905) took advantage of the Canadian government’s large scale ranching leases and established the Oxley Ranch in Southern Alberta. He wrote From Home to Home: Autumn Wanderings in the North-West, in the years 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884 which was published in London in 1885. Stavely was incorporated as a village in 1903. The second “e” in the name was dropped when the town was incorporated in 1912.

Around 1917, Hill’s son wrote from England to Canadian postal and railway authorities, requesting that the missing ‘e’ be restored to the name Staveley. The secretary of the local Board of Trade wrote to the younger Hill, suggesting that if he paid to build a covered skating rink, the town would change the spelling of its name. Hill declined, and Postmaster James Rea suggested that if any change were to be made, Stavely should drop the second ‘e’.

The Stavely Cemetery, also known as the Stavely IOOF Cemetery was photographed and catalogued by AFHS volunteers in the summer of 2024. At last count, there were 1,127 known persons interred at this cemetery.