Lueders developed along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River on land granted by the state of Texas to the heirs of Frederick Luders, a German immigrant who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Early settlers in the area included U.S. Indian agent Jess Stem, who homesteaded a few miles south in 1852, and ranching dominated the region in the late 19th century. In 1900, the Webb and Hill Land and Cattle Company bought the Goethe & Fuchs Ranch on the Clear Fork and developed the town of Lueders, while limestone quarries opened and the Texas Central Railroad extended tracks there from Albany, helping the community quickly gain a school, post office, cotton gins, and businesses. From about 1902 to 1906, burials for local residents took place in a pasture near Rhomberg Street, but digging graves there proved impractical because of thick limestone. In 1907, John M. Roberts, Clark Henry King, and Mrs. E.V. Risley donated land for a new cemetery, also later known as Clear Fork Cemetery, beside the Texas Central railroad tracks, later the MKT. For many years, pallbearers carried caskets up the railroad embankment and down the other side to the burial plots, and an open-sided tabernacle on the cemetery's north side hosted memorial services in its early years. Its earliest burial is the unnamed infant daughter of George and Cate Risley, and the cemetery contains hundreds of graves of pioneer settlers, area residents, and veterans of conflicts dating from the Civil War, marked by granite, marble, concrete, wooden, and locally prominent Lueders limestone gravestones.