Ithaca City Cemetery
When she died in 1875, Ithaca resident Elsie Brooks was a local legend. A parade of mourners accompanied her coffin to her burial site at the Ithaca City Cemetery.
The life stories of Elsie Brooks and other notable Ithacans buried in the Ithaca City Cemetery illustrate the challenges faced and contributions made by African Americans in the Finger Lakes.
Visit Ithaca City Cemetery
University Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850
When she died in 1875, Ithaca resident Elsie Brooks was a local legend. Brooks was born into slavery in Maryland or Virginia and taken to Danby to work on the Furness family farm in the early 1800s. She later married Jacob Brooks and worked as a laundress and herbalist. She sang hymns in the St. James AME Zion Church choir and for local audiences, both white and black. So noted was her fame that her funeral at St. James attracted more than 800 mourners. In fact, there were so many people in the small sanctuary that the floor started to settle from the weight of the crowd. “The church was thronged with the rich as well as the poor,” reported the Ithaca Daily Journal. Ithaca businesspeople arranged for a majestic casket, ornamented with silver fittings and festooned with flowers. Mourners accompanied the casket through the Southside and to the Ithaca City Cemetery, where Brooks was buried in the St. James AME Zion Church section to the words of the hymn “Shall We Meet Beyond the River.” “Where in all the bright forever,” they sang, “sorrow ne’er shall press the soul.”
The earliest known burials in the Ithaca area are associated with the Gayogohó:nǫʔ, or Cayuga, people and their predecessors. Later, what became known as the Ithaca City Cemetery was established as the village burying ground. Its first recorded grave dates to 1790 or 1791, when 17-year-old Rachel Allen died while her family was traveling through the area. The 16-acre site sits on a steep hillside between downtown Ithaca and the Cornell University campus.
Since 2000, Historic Ithaca’s affiliate group, the Friends of Ithaca City Cemetery, has advocated for the preservation of this valued greenspace and memorial to Ithaca’s past. To support the City of Ithaca, which maintains the cemetery, Historic Ithaca sponsors several volunteer cemetery clean-ups a year, repairs and replaces gravestones, and leads historic tours of the site.
The life stories of Elsie Brooks and other notable Ithacans buried in the Ithaca City Cemetery illustrate the challenges faced and contributions made by African Americans.
The Brum Family
Titus Brum (1800-1881) and Eunice Brum (1803-1895) were early residents of Ithaca. Born in Genoa in 1803, Eunice moved to Ithaca in the 1810s, when she was 10 or twelve years old. Titus Brum, who was born in Greene County in about 1800, purchased a lot on South Cayuga Street in 1824. Titus and Eunice raised a large family in the house. Titus was a charter member of the First Baptist Church founded in 1826-1827, and for several decades Eunice was known as the preeminent caterer in the village. For more than three decades “no fashionable wedding in Ithaca and vicinity has been regarded strictly en regle unless Mrs. Brum was the presiding genius over the accompanying feast,” noted the Ithaca Daily Journal in 1885. The Brums actively supported abolition of slavery. The attic of the Brum home was reportedly a haven for freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Eunice and Titus’s oldest child, Ira Brum (1836-1865), served in Company F of the 185th New York Volunteers, reportedly as its only black soldier. He died of typhoid fever shortly after his company was mustered out of service in 1865. In 1951, the Brum’s granddaughter, Jessie Johnson (1860-1951), died and left her home to the Southside Community Center and to the First Baptist Church. A later generation recognized the Brum family’s vital contributions to Ithaca history in July 2012, when the Tompkins County Civil War 150th Commemoration Commission unveiled the restoration of the Brum family gravestone at the Ithaca City Cemetery.
Daniel Jackson and Amy Coleman
During the unveiling of the restored Brum burial monument, the Civil War commission also marked the installation of a new headstone for Amy Coleman (ca. 1784/86-1889). The new grave marker was installed next to that of her son, Daniel Jackson (1814-1889), who died just a few days before his mother. The remarkable inscription on Jackson’s gravestone offers evidence of Underground Railroad activities in Ithaca. “Born a slave,” the inscription reads, “he followed the North Star to Freedom.” In a related letter to the Ithaca Daily Journal, tannery owner Edward S. Esty explained that the pastor of the St. James AME Zion Church was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and regularly came to Esty for assistance for freedom seekers. When asked to aid Jackson and two others, the tannery owner offered them jobs at his factory. After the Civil War, Jackson approached Esty about returning to the South to find his mother. “Boss, she is my mother, I must have her here,” Jackson, in tears, reportedly responded to Esty’s attempts to dissuade him. Finally reunited, Jackson brought his mother with him to live in Ithaca at the home he purchased at 143 West Green Street. “This tribute belongs of right to Faithfulness and filial affection,” concludes the story carved into the Jackson headstone. The Jacksons were also faithful to their church, St. James. Daniel Jackson’s granddaughter, Minnie G. Fletcher (1869-1902), played the organ at St. James and was a board trustee. She later became an ordained minister of the AME Zion Church and served as an assistant pastor in Waverly, New York at the time of her death.
The Johnson Family
On the hillside above the Jackson and Coleman gravestones lies the final resting place of Reverend Henry Johnson (ca. 1790-1865), the founding pastor of St. James AME Zion Church, his wife Elizabeth Johnson (ca. 1791/1795-1858), and family members. The Johnsons had seven children, and fostered nine others. One son, William F. Johnson (ca. 1820/22-1903), attended the New York Institute for the Blind in New York City. In the 1850s, he delivered popular abolitionist lectures in cities on the East Coast. Ads touting magic lantern slides that “Exhibit a Number of Pictures of a Miscellaneous Character—Delineations from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Comprising Diagrams Representing Southern Slave Life as It Really Exists” attracted large audiences. Later, William ran the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn’s Weeksville neighborhood for three decades. The orphanage was the first run by African Americans in New York City; William developed vocational education programs modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. After his death in Brooklyn in 1903, William was brought to Ithaca to be buried. Although the location of his grave is unmarked and unknown, it is likely beside those of his parents and his wife.
Civil War Soldiers
The Civil War dealt a death blow to slavery in the United States and initiated a process of extending fundamental civil rights to African Americans. It also marked a change in mourning practices for soldiers. Shortly after the war ended, on May 1, 1865, a parade of some 10,000 mourners commemorated Union soldiers who died in Charleston, South Carolina. Black children headed the parade, carrying roses and singing “John Brown’s Body” (“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/but his soul goes marching on”). Behind them, hundreds of African American women bore crosses, wreaths, and baskets of flowers to decorate the graves of the soldiers. This event strikingly combined the common tradition—generally supervised by women—of decorating the graves of loved ones with the long-standing emancipation celebrations practiced in African American communities. Such community-wide commemorations for Civil War soldiers became popular in the late 1860s and 1870s. In 1868, the Grand Army of the Republic, an integrated fraternal organization of Union veterans, urged Americans to honor Civil War soldiers on May 30. New York declared the date a legal holiday in 1873. Commonly known as Decoration Day, the May commemoration became known as Memorial Day; after World War I it extended to soldiers killed in all wars and became a federal holiday in 1971.
In one of the early Memorial Day events in Ithaca, in 1876, the Sumner Literary Society, a debate club for African Americans whose members included several Civil War veterans, marched in the parade. The procession stopped at DeWitt Park for speeches and then continued to the Ithaca City Cemetery, where Louise Smith and Elsie Johnson from St. James AME Zion Church were two of the girls chosen to place flowers on soldiers’ graves. Among those honored were men from the 26th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT): Jacob Johnson, John R. Ross, John D. Smith (1809-1870), Henry Allen (b. 1814), and Daniel Johnson. All five had enlisted at St. James AME Zion Church. In 1863 and 1864, St. James had organized recruitment drives for soldiers to serve in the Union Army, inspired in part by national black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet. African Americans saw participation as a way to fight against enslavement and for an extension of full citizenship rights. The Bureau of Colored Troops, later known as the United States Colored Troops, had been formally established in May 1863. Prejudice against black soldiers had kept the government from recruiting them at the beginning of the conflict. White officers led most of the black units, and many were initially only allowed non-combat positions and were paid less than white soldiers. Nevertheless, despite these restrictions, about 200,000 black Americans served in the Army and Navy during the Civil War, aiding the emancipation of millions of enslaved people.
Indeed, black soldiers had fought in every war since the beginning of the nation. “We are true lovers of human freedom! because we know by a bitter past, the tortures of bondage and oppression,” commented Ithaca leader George A. Johnson at the Emancipation Day celebration held in Ithaca in 1883. “During the late rebellion [black soldiers] again gave aid to the cause of justice and humanity, in fighting to preserve the union, and to cut the cancer of slavery from the body politic,” Johnson pointed out, noting African American soldiers’ fight for freedom in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. “We have earned on fields of labor and of battle, all of the scant privileges we now have, and are fully entitled to political independence and all else that belongs to complete and untrammeled citizenship.”
A number of other black soldiers recruited in Tompkins County who served in the 26th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry are buried in the Ithaca City Cemetery. U.S. flags adorn the gravestones of 26th Regiment soldiers Henry Y. Selby (d. 1877), John Henry Tyler (1845-1909) and his father Reverend Zachariah H. Tyler (1819-1896), Jacob Guess (1815-1896), Charles Seward Shaw (d. 1901), George Washington Guinn (1819-1894), and William Wesley “Billy” Waters (d. 1910). Most served in Company B, and Waters and Smith in Company K. Civil Warriors, a film produced by Deborah Hoard and Che Broadnax in 2015 and based on a play, I Am a Man, Too by Tompkins County Historian Carol Kammen, dramatized the stories of the father and son enlistees, the Tylers of Ithaca and the Sorrells of Dryden.
While most of the Civil War veterans are buried in family plots, several are interred in the veterans’ section in the southeast part of the cemetery. These include Ross and Waters, as well as Adam Price (d. 1905; Company D, 5th Regiment (Colored), Massachusetts Cavalry) and Sylvester T. Suzey (d. 1908; Company B, 8th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops). Suzey, a popular Sumner Literary Society Member and community leader known around Ithaca as “Vet” Suzey, is included on the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Sydney Camp #41 of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War continues to honor veterans, both black and white, by maintaining the cemetery’s Grand Army of the Republic plot and decorating gravesites with flags on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day. In addition, Historic Ithaca has worked to replace monuments, including most recently that of Henry Selby, whose gravestone had been damaged when a tree toppled on it.