A church and cemetery were established here in the 1880s. Stephen P. Douglas, who died in 1889, is the earliest marked burial. In 1890, Abraham and Susanna Bellamy donated the land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in memory of her parents-Joseph and Susanna Vereen. A building completed in 1891 served as the community's church, and for some years, as a public school, until it was destroyed by forest fire in 1920.