Amherst West Cemetery
cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts
Amherst West Cemetery is a historic cemetery on Triangle Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. The 4-acre (1.6 ha) cemetery was first laid out in 1730, when the voters of Hadley elected to establish a new burying ground in its eastern precinct. When the area was separated as Amherst in 1786, the property was taken over by the newly established town. In addition to being the burial site of many of Amherst's early settlers and American Civil War veterans (both white and African American), it is also the burial site of members of the Dickinson family, most notably the poet Emily Dickinson. Their family plot is set off from the rest of the cemetery by a wrought iron fence.
The oldest portion of the cemetery is in the southwest, where there are hundreds of older slate gravemarkers. The oldest marked site is dated 1737, although there may well be earlier unmarked burials. Over two dozen carvers have been identified as creators of the colonial-era markers. Markers placed during the Victorian era were made predominantly of limestone and brownstone, which gradually gave way to granite, especially for marking the sites of well-to-do families. A portion in the southeast of the cemetery contains mainly African American burials, with much simpler burial stones and markings than elsewhere in the cemetery.
The public source identifies “Amherst West Cemetery” as cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Amherst, West and Cemetery.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4746056. Authority coordinates are 42.379, -72.519. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1730, 1786 and 1737.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amherst West Cemetery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.