St. Mary's Cemetery was founded in 1883 by German families who had recently settled in the area and named their community Westphalia after their German home province. Casper Hoelscher, Frank Wunsch, Theodore Rabroker, J.G. Bockholt, and Frank Glass each contributed to the purchase of 100 acres, which were then donated for a community school, church, priest's residence, and cemetery. The oldest grave is the 1884 burial of five-year-old Heinrich Bernard Lenz, son of Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Lenz, and like many early grave markers there, his is inscribed in German. The oldest graves are in the northern section of the site, where a large metal cross marks the grave of Theodore Rabroker, Westphalia's first settler and one of the cemetery property donors. Veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War are interred there. A cemetery association was formed before 1922, and early members were required to pay dues for upkeep. Although that practice has been discontinued, the cemetery remains open for the burial of parishioners of the Church of the Visitation, and as the primary resting place for Westphalia's earliest settlers, it remains a symbol of those early pioneers.