After the Civil War, African Americans from across the former Confederacy settled here in a farming community called The Colony. Many owned their own farms and others were sharecroppers. The community established Mount Olive Baptist Church in the mid-1870s, and it also housed the local school until a nearby schoolhouse was built in the 1890s. About 1880, Bedford Chapel Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was founded. When its building burned in the 1950s, many of its members joined Mount Olive Baptist Church. The Colony thrived through the 1930s, then slowly dwindled as residents sought opportunities elsewhere. Since 1972, descendants have held biennial reunions to celebrate The Colony’s legacy. The Mount Olive / Bedford Chapel Cemetery and Mount Olive Baptist Church are the last remnants of The Colony. The cemetery contains more than 90 marked and unmarked burials dating from the early 20th century into the 21st. Members of both local churches, including early settlers of the community and veterans of both world wars, are buried there, and many graves exhibit funerary art and customs characteristic of similar rural African American communities.