A Suburban Cemetery

As the northeast Ithaca community evolved from farmlands to university suburb at the turn of the nineteenth century, Pleasant Grove Cemetery reflected these changes. Faculty, staff, and alumni of Cornell University bought burial lots in the cemetery just north of campus.
Nationally recognized Cornell professor of American history Moses Coit Tyler (1835-1900) chose a lot at Pleasant Grove Cemetery in the 1890s, a few years after he had started teaching at Cornell. The purchase made him feel more rooted in the Ithaca community, where, as the professor noted, “I have found my work, my home, my grave.” (Michael G. Kammen, Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), 24.)
The Cornell Alumni News described the bucolic setting of Pleasant Grove Cemetery that had drawn Tyler to the site:
Nationally recognized Cornell professor of American history Moses Coit Tyler (1835-1900) chose a lot at Pleasant Grove Cemetery in the 1890s, a few years after he had started teaching at Cornell. The purchase made him feel more rooted in the Ithaca community, where, as the professor noted, “I have found my work, my home, my grave.” (Michael G. Kammen, Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), 24.)
The Cornell Alumni News described the bucolic setting of Pleasant Grove Cemetery that had drawn Tyler to the site:
“In [Tyler’s] walks and rides about Ithaca he had early noticed the quiet beauty of a little country graveyard on the road running north from Forest Home. It is on a slight knoll by the roadside and commands a wide prospect of the distant hills. This was the spot he chose for his last earthly abode, and often passing it on his walks he discoursed with his friends of its peacefulness, and spoke of the future with the calmness and certainty of Christian belief. And here his family and a little company of devoted friends laid him to rest the last Sunday of the century. It was a gray winter afternoon, but the landscape had a beauty all its own. The woods stood out dark against the snow and hid the towers of the University but on the still air fell the sound of the distant chimes, which for nineteen years had called the sleeper to his pleasant tasks.”
"Professor M.C. Tyler Dead. Cornell's Well Known Historian and Professor Passes Away," Cornell Alumni News, January 2, 1901, 109.

Pleasant Grove Cemetery memorializes other Cornell faculty members whose academic contributions live on--among them chemist Peter J. W. Debye (of 634 Highland Road), astronomer Thomas Gold (of 414 Cayuga Heights Road), and writing stylist William Strunk Jr.
The epitaph on the gravestone of poet A.R. "Archie" Ammons (of 606 Hanshaw Road) at Pleasant Grove Cemetery reads "This is just a place," a repeated line from his poem, "In Memoriam Mae Noblitt." The elegy appeared in A Coast of Trees (1981), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The lovely lines were read at one of the memorial tributes dedicated to Ammons.
Essayist Stephen Burt notes that Ammons' poem reminds us "that the cemetery is only one of the places we sometimes go, mourning just one of the moods we can harbor, even though (while we mourn) it feels like the only one." ("In Retrospect: Stephen Burt on A.R. Ammons' 'A Coast of Trees,'" Critical Mass, The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, May 18, 2010.)
The epitaph on the gravestone of poet A.R. "Archie" Ammons (of 606 Hanshaw Road) at Pleasant Grove Cemetery reads "This is just a place," a repeated line from his poem, "In Memoriam Mae Noblitt." The elegy appeared in A Coast of Trees (1981), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The lovely lines were read at one of the memorial tributes dedicated to Ammons.
Essayist Stephen Burt notes that Ammons' poem reminds us "that the cemetery is only one of the places we sometimes go, mourning just one of the moods we can harbor, even though (while we mourn) it feels like the only one." ("In Retrospect: Stephen Burt on A.R. Ammons' 'A Coast of Trees,'" Critical Mass, The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, May 18, 2010.)
Pleasant Grove Cemetery Today
After more than 200 years of continuous use by the Tompkins County community, Pleasant Grove Cemetery retains its beauty and peacefulness. It continues to serve as a place of memory and commemoration for families and the broader community.