About 1.6 miles north of this location, the village of Cyrene was founded about 1890 by C. S. Hodges and W. G. Powell as one of many mill towns established along the railroad to use the vast forests of Southern Pine, with naval stores and lumber as its primary products. At one time, the village had a post office, sawmill, turpentine still, cotton gin, commissaries, and about 500 inhabitants. After the Hodges Sawmill was lost to fire in 1927 and the lean Depression years that followed, the naval stores industry began to decline, and today only a few people live in Cyrene. In 1909, Hodges and Powell also founded the Cyrene Institute in the village to provide preparatory education for boys, later expanding the curriculum that same year to co-educational teaching and enlarging the facilities to accommodate boarding students, at which time the school was deeded to the Bowen Baptist Association. The Cyrene Institute offered primary and secondary education with some college preparatory courses and included girls' and boys' dormitories, a dining hall, and a general administration building, with accommodations for approximately 100 students, but after only a few years in operation the school closed about 1916.