In a previous article I quoted the 1880 history of Eaton County that said the wife of Edward O. Smith saw a large group of Potawatomi Indians during the Indian removal of 1840, the year before she died. (The county history said she died in 1842, not 1841. I would usually trust the gravestone over the history.) This cemetery is next to Edward O. Smith’s farm, though it’s not the place he was farming in 1840. And here I learned the name of his wife. She was Anna Carpenter Smith.

Her original gravestone is here under a tree, and her husband’s is the tilted, sunken one to the right of it, where it is being pushed over by the tree.

Their son’s old farmstead is across the road. There is a home on the parents’ old place too, but it’s not a place that looks so much like an old farmstead.

I tried to speculate on why in the very first years of farm-building they would have let someone else farm here one year while they went to farm another place they didn’t own a few miles to the north (where the big Indian trail crossed). Their investments in fencing and clearing were so crucial to success, and the difference between success and failure so small, that it’s hard to imagine what would have been in it for either party. I didn’t get any ideas from looking at the two places.

This part of Sunfield township was slightly more rolling than I had expected, but most people would call it flat. The cemetery is on the biggest hill around. I thought it was a pretty setting — certainly a good place for a bike ride. There is a small Amish settlement just three miles to the south, but I was not fast enough to get any Sunday afternoon buggy photos there.