The Smith Family Cemetery is the final resting place of Joseph Smith Jr. (church founder), his wife Emma, and brother Hyrum, and twenty-four other family members, including Lucy Mack and Joseph Smith Sr.

After Joseph Smith Jr. and Hyrum were assassinated at the Carthage jail on June 27, 1844, their bodies were returned to the Nauvoo House and secretly buried between the foundation walls of the house. When construction of the Nauvoo House resumed in 1845, the bodies were secretly reburied under the Spring House southwest of the Homestead.

In 1928, Frederick Madison Smith, president and prophet of the church from 1915-1946 and grandson of Joseph Smith Jr., hired Kansas City, Missouri, surveyor W. O. Hands to locate the unmarked graves of Joseph and Hyrum and give them proper burial. Today, a reconstructed Spring House stands over the site where their bodies were found.