It’s a quiet place.The day-to-day noise of students going to classes doesn’t reach past the black iron fence. Stately oak trees tower peacefully over granite, disturbed only by the occasional car passing on Pammel Drive. In many places, only wreaths and metal stars honoring military service give evidence to plaques beneath the snow.The final resting place of faculty whose names students now only associate with buildings, the Iowa State Cemetery is a little-known landmark and a rarity among large universities.This secular cemetery, created in 1876, is dominated by a giant granite obelisk bearing the name ‘Welch,’ honoring Iowa State’s first president, Adonijah Welch. The cemetery covers five acres on what is now the northwest edge of campus, past Molecular Biology and Town Engineering, according to “The Iowa State University Campus and Its Buildings” by H. Summerfield Day.”One of the things that is special to having the cemetery at Iowa State is that it allows people for whom Iowa State is a significant part of their life to have the option to make Iowa State part of their home,” said Cathy Brown, program coordinator for facilities planning and management. “It brings that part of their life to closure.”Interim President Richard Seagrave said the cemetery is noteworthy and is “important to the people whose families are buried there.”George Burnet, former interim dean of the engineering college and distinguished professor of chemical engineering, said Iowa State has played a large role in his family’s life. His wife, Betty Arlene Riggs, is buried in the cemetery.”We moved to Ames in 1956,” he said. “This was home for us, and we feel that Iowa State has been a part of our family. Four of our children graduated from here, and we felt like we belonged here.”Filled with monuments bearing names like Parks, Beardshear, Marston and Knapp, the cemetery contains more than 700 burials or cremations and has 15 to 20 burials a year. Iowa State collects a fee for burial and the plot remains university property, Brown said. It is also maintained by the university grounds committee.Eligibility requirements are strict, Brown said. An individual needs to have 20 years of service at Iowa State and must be a tenured faculty member or upper-level administrator to receive a plot.”Their leaving the university has to be through retirement or death,” Brown said.Very few universities have their own cemeteries, she said. “I know Notre Dame does, and a few others, but not many.”Burnet said Iowa State’s cemetery gives the university character.”It is one of those traditions that goes back to the beginning of the college,” he said.