The Cleveland, Idaho cemetery is located on the old Cleveland Road. This road intersects with Idaho State Route 34 about 15 miles north of Preston, Idaho and again at Thatcher, Idaho about 25 miles north of Preston. At one time, Cleveland boasted a country store, post office, school, community swimming pool, and a LDS Meetinghouse.
Nathan Smith Jr., his wife Hannah Hansen Smith and many of their children are buried in the Cleveland Cemtery. Nathan Smith Jr. was my great-grandfather. He died many years before I was born. I was about five and a half years old, however, when great-grandmother Smith died. My family was living in the Smith farmhouse on Old Cleveland Road. My grandfather, Nathan LeRoy Smith and his family lived across the street in the old Cleveland schoolhouse. Great-grandmother Smith's home was about 200 feet to the north of the farmhouse and the Cleveland Ward building was about 200 feet to the south.
I don't have many memories of Great-grandmother Smith, other than having pancakes for breakfast on several occasions in her very small kitchen. Her funeral was on a bright, clear October afternoon and was held in the Cleveland Ward building. I remember the chapel was full and overflowing with people attending her funeral.
A few months after Great-grandmother Smith died, her home was purposely burned to the ground because it was too infested with termites to be saved.
The next spring the farmhouse caught fire and burned to the ground as well. An electrical short in the attic sparked the disasterous fire which destroyed most of the pictures and other genealogical information about the Nathan Smith Jr. family.
A couple of years later the school house was demolished. The rubble was pushed into the basement where the boiler room had been and was then covered over with dirt. By 1955 the Cleveland population had dwindled enough that the ward was disbanded and the members sent to either the Treasureton Ward or the Thatcher Ward. The building was sold as a private residence but never occupied. It burned down a couple of years later and was eventually demolished.
Today a couple of nice manufactured homes now sit on the property where the old farmhouse and ward building once stood. There are no traces of the general store, ward building, or school house. Some of the structures for the swimming pool still stand in the midst of a number of natural hot springs. (by Roland Smith)