According to local tradition, this site was established as a community graveyard about 1873, the year Eastland County was organized and one year before the community of Merriman was selected as county seat. Although many gravestones in the cemetery are unmarked, the earliest recorded burial is that of Orthosias Scarborough, who died in 1879. The first legal record of the cemetery came in an 1891 deed by the Taylor Charcoal Company conveying two acres for use as a public burial ground to trustee M.V. Brewer. Oil discovered in 1917 on land owned by John H. McCleskey, who was buried here in 1918, began an oil boom that ultimately threatened the cemetery’s sanctity. Oil speculators reportedly offered members of the Merriman Baptist Church a large sum of money to lease the grounds for drilling, but the congregation, although its association with the cemetery is uncertain, refused. In 1938, Josie Fox Duncan, who died in 1940, deeded 75 acres to cemetery trustees to provide income for perpetual care. The cemetery contains graves of early settlers, veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Korea, and victims of a 1916–17 influenza epidemic.