Riverside Cemetery was not officially established until 1860, though records show a desire to create a cemetery at this location as early as 1857, and Mary McIntire (1816-1856) was the first recorded interment there. The original plot was acquired from Salome and A.F. Stearns by the Township of Iola in 1860 for $20 to establish a cemetery. At the time of Mary McIntire’s burial, the property was owned by her husband, E.A. McIntire, who was the taxpayer of record in 1856 and 1857. Before the Township of Iola acquired the land, McIntire sold the property, including the original cemetery plot, to the Stearns, and six additional people were buried there in the interim. The cemetery remained the same size for 130 years until an adjoining acquisition in 1991 doubled it. Among notable interments are prominent early figures in Iola’s history, including Jacob and Conrad Wipf, who acquired the original Chandler and Baldwin mill operations in 1860 and inaugurated the present Iola Mills structure in 1861; John Leuthold, who arrived in the spring of 1857, became the largest landowner in Waupaca County, named Helvetia Township, and served as its first chairman; Abel Dufur, who helped build the Methodist Church, and A.J. "Andrew Jackson" Dufur, an early Iola Township chairman and Wisconsin Assembly member; James Hatch, a lawyer, pastor, and Justice of the Peace, and Albert Hatch, a hardware dealer, whose properties surrounded Hatch Lake; James Keating, Helvetia Township’s first treasurer, who gave his name to Keating Lake; Albert Weinmann, Sr., a blacksmith, wagon maker, and postmaster named in 1893, whose family also worked in furniture and undertaking; S.M. Myhre, who founded Iola’s first bank in 1893, later consolidated with the Farmers State Bank in 1933; Dr. George Dale, who opened a nationally recognized cancer sanatorium in 1887 and also operated drug and liquor stores while serving as the Village of Iola’s first president; and Thomas S. Parker, a Civil War veteran whose gravesite is marked by a pair of monuments and who was one of two Confederate veterans buried in Waupaca County.