Saint Michael's Cemetery was founded in the 1860s as a place to bury poor immigrant workers and families who came to South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to find a better life in the Iron and Zinc industries. The steep slope was donated by the industrial barons out of near necessity. People came in waves, first the Irish escaping the potato famine, then Belgians, who had experience with zinc smelting, then Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans of all ethnicities. Most were near destitute. While the Philadelphia Diocese organized a parish, named Holy Infancy, to care for the mostly Roman Catholic immigrants, it was the families themselves tasked with maintaining their own family plots, usually fenced with iron or anything available.

St. Michael's was enlarged beyond its original square shape as more and more plots were needed, and today we find burials up the hill and into the woods as marked by the photo below.

As time went on, the original families melted into the Great American Pot, moved away, and by the1930s, many family plots went untended. This was problem enough, but it became evident that the steep hill of the cemetery was made of sand, making maintenance using modern equipment difficult, and sliding the burial sites and gravestones ever downward. Large trees grew among the stones, lived their entire lives, and died from weather or infestation.

The 1930s saw the only extant map of St. Michael's, produced by William Sinnott, who also oversaw the newer, Diocesan Holy Saviour Cemetery across the Lehigh River. It's evident that Sinnott struggled with connecting individual burials with the family plots, as records of the time may have shown the patriarch of the plot, not necessarily the interees.

There have always been volunteers, though, who have attempted, with greater or lesser success, to preserve the site and keep the names and stories alive. It has been a Sisyphean task, literally, but an honor to belatedly witness and memorialize the lives of the people who built America.