Hezekiah Smith, a free African American born in 1816, and Lucinda Smith, born in 1824, moved from Ohio to Michigan and settled near Ferrysburg in the 1840s. Hezekiah worked as a blacksmith and eventually became a prominent regional landowner and farmer. In 1849 he purchased forty acres on the shore of Spring Lake, expanded his farm to 253 acres by 1862, and amassed 503 acres over his lifetime. He grew cereal crops and more than twenty acres of apple and peach trees, and his fruit won several premium awards at the county fair. The State Board of Agriculture called his orchard one of the finest and among the oldest around Spring Lake, and the State Horticultural Society also praised the quality of his trees. During the years the Smiths lived there, this arm of Spring Lake became known as Smith Bayou. By 1880 nineteen African American families lived in Grand Haven, Spring Lake, and Ferrysburg, and Hezekiah Smith was a leader of this community from the 1860s to the 1890s as well as president of an association of African Americans in Muskegon and Ottawa Counties. In October 1860 he was elected to represent them in Battle Creek at the Colored People’s Convention to advance the condition of African Americans, and the Grand Haven News reported that he pledged to do all in his power to secure for them the right of suffrage. He represented the community again in 1894 as one of seven delegates to an equal rights convention in Grand Rapids. After Lucinda Smith’s death, Hezekiah married Helen Hicks in 1884 and Sarah Miller in 1894, and Sarah inherited his farm.