In 1830 Etienne (Stephen) and Mary Rose arrived in Detroit from Montreal and settled with their children near here. Rose and his sons supported the family by cutting and selling wood at fifty cents a cord. In 1840 the Roses bought about thirty-seven acres of land from the government, and on November 30, 1849, they deeded some of it to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit to build a church and cemetery. Early burials included remains of some of the community's earliest settlers, first buried along Anchor Bay and later moved to the cemetery's southeast corner because of rising water levels. The burial ground became the resting place for many of Ira Township's earliest immigrant residents from Switzerland, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, England, and the Netherlands. Approximately 1,850 people were buried there, most of them members of the nearby Catholic Church, including twelve Civil War veterans such as Stephen Rose, son of Etienne and Mary Rose. In 1872 a worldwide smallpox epidemic reached Ira Township and killed twenty-nine people, almost half of whom were buried there. Although some graves are unmarked, many have markers of concrete, marble, limestone, and sculpted iron. The cemetery and the nearby parish church were renamed Immaculate Conception in the early twentieth century, and in 1911 the church reaffirmed its commitment to the cemetery, declaring, "Make it God's acre, a sacred dormitory where His weary children sleep til the day of the Resurrection."