When Nathaniel and Sarah Smith came to the Forest area from Vermont in 1837, members of the Henry Hiester family were the only Euro-American settlers in the area. Sarah Smith died in 1848 and was the first person interred in the cemetery that bears the family name. Nathaniel, the township’s first supervisor, and his son William, the first teacher, were also buried in the cemetery. Six hundred nineteenth-century graves are marked by rustic tree trunk monuments, obelisks, tablets and pedestaled urns.