Near this site stood the town once known as Strunksville, which included a store, post office, saloon, and a horse and mule gin owned and operated by one of its first settlers, Diedrich Strunk. On April 12, 1868, pastor Christoph Geiger, a German Lutheran minister sent to the United States from a missionary training school in Basel, Switzerland, organized the Lutheran Church to serve scattered communities and establish congregations where feasible. The community began burying its dead at Geiger Cemetery as early as 1868, although that date is uncertain because some graves are unmarked or illegible. In 1879, Diedrich Strunk, Robert Miller, Sr., and C. Fernau, as trustees of the Lutheran Church, bought 24 acres from the Grayson Brothers of Pennsylvania for $65.50, including the cemetery. The congregation's first church building was called Bethlehem, and in 1886 Pastor Geiger planned a larger church on the same site; Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church was completed on May 26, 1887. In 1905 the church was carefully taken down, moved by oxcart to the growing town of Sublime, and re-erected there to better serve its congregation, many of whom lived in town. The cemetery remained the town's graveyard, and in the 1950s women of the Lutheran and Baptist churches held ice cream socials and noodle soup suppers to raise money for a chain link fence and entrance gate. Families still come from miles around to maintain one of the oldest cemeteries in the area and one of the few remnants of a bygone town.