Clarks Summit State Hospital began in 1862 as a so-called “poor farm” named the Hillside Home and Hospital. Authority over the farm changed over the decades from Providence Township to nearby Scranton and eventually Lackawanna County. Throughout these shifts, more and more people who had been declared insane were held at the Hillside Home. In 1943, Pennsylvania took charge of the property and renamed it Clarks Summit State Hospital. Its population peaked in the mid 1950s at about 1,450 individuals, after which time deinstitutionalization gradually shrank this number. Clarks Summit State Hospital still operates today, with 203 inpatient beds.

The cemetery does not contain any individual headstones. A plaque at the front of the well-maintained cemetery gives the names and death dates of twenty-five people who died between 1948 and 1956. It was dedicated in May of 1987. Newspaper obituaries indicate that people were buried in a “Hillside Farm” cemetery in the early twentieth century, but it is unclear how many and whether those burials took place in the same location as the current plaque.