Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness, Old Cedar Community faced raiding Indians and the hardships of frontier life, creating an immediate need for a cemetery established that same year, with plots free to any person. Many noted settlers are buried there, including one Union and 18 Confederate veterans of the Civil War, and of some 400 graves, half are marked. After the community was well established, Cedar Academy was organized in 1871 on a 3-acre campus for which D.H. Dumas gave the land, and enrollment reached 79 in 1872; besides the usual subjects, students learned how to make ink and split goose-quills for pens. The school was later renamed Cedar High School and merged with the Tom Bean District in 1937. Cedar Methodist Church was also organized in 1871, and the congregation first worshipped in a log house on property deeded by J.G. Vestal and Col. J.R. Cole. A half mile south of the church on Whitemound-Cedar Road, a 7-acre tract donated by Mr. and Mrs. B.M. Carr served as a campground for revivals, where each summer people came from miles away, pitched their tents, and attended services under a brush arbor. A frame church built in 1891 was destroyed by a tornado in 1960, and the present structure was dedicated in October of that same year.