Hillside Cemetery in the Northern area of Cedar Falls is significant for historical and literary reasons. It was originally the family plot of Solomon and Martha Knapp, who buried 24-year old Oscar Knapp here in 1855. The following year, the Knapps donated a three-quarter acre area on the sloping hillside to Washington Township trustees for use as a public cemetery.

A number of early Cedar Falls pioneers are buried in Hillside Cemetery. Perhaps the best known are Zimri and Lucinda Streeter, grandparents of Cedar Falls novelist Bess Streeter Aldrich. Hillside Cemetery was immortalized in Bess Streeter Aldrich's 1939 novel, Song of Years. Her description of the cemetery is as follows:

Here rest those first settlers. It is a place of utter peace. There are times when no sound penetrates but the rustling of the corn or the dropping of a pine cone. Sometimes, though, one will hear a combine at work near these sleeping men who cut their grain with a cradle, or perchance a plane zoom over the heads of these quiet ones who followed the grassy trail with oxen.

A plaque designating the cemetery as "Song of Years" Cemetery was placed in 1996.