Old Cedar Community

Cedar Cemetery has almost no paper trail. A county genealogy page says its early burial records were lost when the 1960 tornado destroyed the church, that no deed or plat has turned up, and that surveys first call it an established graveyard in 1893. Early graves were marked with hand-carved bois d'arc slabs and planted cedars, and markers cut from some local stone have crumbled. The page also says neighbors buried a man in 1860 whom they assumed had run away from slavery; his name was never recorded.

What the plaque says

Old Cedar Community Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers, who reclaimed land from wilderness, raiding Indians and hardships of frontier life soon created need for a cemetery, established the same year. The plots were free to any person. Many noted settlers are buried here, including one Union and 18 Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Of some 400 graves, half are marked. After community was well established, a school-- Cedar Academy -- was organized in 1871. D. H. Dumas gave the land for a 3-acre campus. Enrollment reached 79 in 1872. Here, besides the usual subjects, students learned how to make ink and split goose-quills for pens. Later name was changed to Cedar High School. It merged with the Tom Bean District in 1937. Cedar Methodist Church was organized in 1871. The congregation worshipped in a log house on property deeded by J. G. Vestal and Col. J. R. Cole. A half mile south of Church of Whitemound-Cedar Road, a 7-acre tract donated by Mr. and Mrs. B. M. Carr was used as a camp ground for revivals. Each summer people would come for miles, pitch their tents there, and attend services under a brush arbor. A frame church built in 1891 was destroyed by a tornado in 1960. The present structure was dedicated October, same year. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower State Park — 18 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• Site of Early Grayson County Settlement - Whitemound — 3.2 mi
• City of Tom Bean — 3.2 mi
• Antioch Baptist Church — 4.6 mi
• Kentucky Town — 4.9 mi