According to legend, the first burial in this cemetery was a young girl whose family, traveling through the area when she died, buried her here before continuing westward. Oral tradition also suggests that William Whitaker was already interred in a brick vault by the time Richard Sparks set aside land on this site for use as a community graveyard in 1838, the same spring that the Union Baptist Church, later the Old North Church, was organized. The oldest marked grave is that of Saletha Easter Whitaker, who died in 1845. In 1892, Dr. John M. Sparks and his wife formally deeded ten acres, including the original five acres set aside by Richard Sparks, to the Union church. Historically the cemetery was divided into two sections, with the east side used for the burials of local slaves, many of whom were members of the church, and it eventually became a separate cemetery. Other burials of interest include veterans of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Texas Revolution. Records indicate that some forty-seven Confederate Civil War soldiers are buried in the southern portion of the cemetery, and twenty-one Union soldiers are interred in unmarked graves, most of them victims of an epidemic of dysentery during the Reconstruction era. The Old North Church Cemetery Association was organized in 1976, and with more than 950 graves in 1998, the graveyard continued to be used by descendants of early church members as a chronicle of the early days of Nacogdoches County.