Cedar Grove (Independence County) [Northeast]

There are two communities named Cedar Grove in Independence County, one south of the White River between Floral and Pleasant Plains, and the other north of the White River near Charlotte and Cave City (Sharp and Independence counties); the two communities are often confused. Both are historical communities dating back to before the Civil War. Both are said to take their names from clusters of cedar trees found in the areas where log homes were built by the first settlers. Each one has a Cedar Grove Cemetery.

Cedar Grove in the northeastern part of the county is located in Dota Township on Curia Creek seven miles southeast of Cave City and about fourteen miles east-northeast of Batesville (Independence County). The Jackson Military Road, which was built in 1831 and paralleled the old Southwest Trail, was about three miles east of Cedar Grove and was a main highway in the 1800s. The alluvial Black and White river bottoms lie to the east and south.

Native Americans made the areas near the Black and White rivers their home in pre-Columbian times. At the beginning of the twentieth century, archaeologist Clarence Bloomfield Moore excavated several sites, including Little Turkey Hill, near what is today Dowdy (Independence County), about six and a half miles east-southeast of Cedar Grove.

The deed records at Powhatan (Lawrence County) show that French settlers claimed lands along the Black River following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. These claims were settled in 1815, and the French settlers made deeds to a land speculator from St. Louis, Missouri, named William Russell.

The James family was among the first to settle in Cedar Grove, and many of their descendants continued to live in the community. Elisha K. James and family traveled to Arkansas Territory from Lawrence County, Tennessee, and are first shown in the territory on tax records in 1828. After settling in what is now Lee County and then serving as a justice of the peace in St. Francis County, Elisha K. James moved to Napoleon (Desha County) in 1838, then to Batesville (where he remarried) in 1843, and then back to Napoleon alone in 1845, and there he died in 1848. Four of his children were listed as living in Black River Township of Independence County on the 1850 census. His eldest son, Elijah James, with his wife, Jane Ann Martha Goodwin James (born in Virginia), and family bought 160 acres at Cedar Grove in 1859. The main burial ground for Cedar Grove is the James Cemetery.

Elijah James, who served in the Mexican War, enlisted together with his son Thomas (then eighteen years old) in the Union army of General Samuel Curtis on June 20, 1862, with Elijah serving as first lieutenant in Company C of the First Arkansas Volunteers, organized in Helena (Phillips County). The Cedar Grove area was a hotbed of Union activity throughout the war, making it a much divided community. Elijah James died of typhoid in an army hospital in Benton Barracks in St. Louis on November 14, 1862. His daughter, Caroline Virginia James Turner, drowned in the White River in early 1863, shortly after receiving word of her father’s death; family history relates that a group of Confederates drove her into the freezing river after learning that both her father and husband were serving in the Union army. Elijah’s son Thomas Jefferson James was, according to family history, captured by Confederate troops after mustering out of service at St. Louis on December 31, 1862, and died on a prison boat on the Mississippi River in 1863

A founding member of Cedar Grove was Washington Monroe Lewallen, who in 1848 married Mary Ann Jane Wann in Jackson County, Alabama. By the 1850 census, the couple and their son were living on Reeds Creek (Lawrence County). Their daughter Martha Elizabeth Wann married William Elijah James II. Mary Ann Wann’s father, Robert Jasper Wann, had assisted in the Cherokee Removal in 1838 as part of Captain Joshua Wann’s Company under Norwood’s Battalion, Alabama Military, for three months. He mustered in with son Samuel Wann. The Trail of Tears had taken him near what would later be the home of Mary Ann and her husband in Cedar Grove. Lewallen descendants continue to live in the area.

Cedar Grove, with no post office of its own, was served by the Mobley (Sharp County) post office about a mile and a half to the north. The Mobley Post Office existed from 1891 until 1954. The general store at Cedar Grove was owned and operated by Dewey James and his father, George Washington (G. W.) James. The James Store was located on Cedar Grove Road on the Independence County side of the line with Sharp County.

The Bayou Dota Academy was established in the area in 1858. In 1936, the old wooden building used by the academy was demolished and replaced with a sandstone rock building built by the Works Progress Administration.

The children of Cedar Grove/Mobley attended the first school in the Etna community, four miles away from Cedar Grove, in the mid-1800s. The Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church, in 1850, took over a log cabin abandoned by a Methodist congregation and began holding a school of sorts there, in addition to religious services. The school became official when a new church building was constructed in 1903, and it is estimated that 150 children went to school there. Cedar Grove School District No. 95 was established in 1913 and merged with the Cave City and Charlotte schools in 1946. When it closed, every piece of the school was auctioned off.

Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery and its sister church, New Prospect Missionary Baptist Church, became Cedar Grove landmarks. The new Cedar Grove church was completed in 1945 to replace the original structure built during Reconstruction; the building still stands in the twenty-first century. The Prospect church building was moved to the Liles farm by Bill Liles and has been restored at Shamrock Lane in Charlotte.

The historic Cedar Grove Bridge across Curia Creek was built in 1912 and was a boost to the community and its economy. It was torn down in 1986 after an overloaded dump truck broke through, causing the bridge to be ruled unsafe by the county.

By the early 1900s, Cedar Grove was a bustling hamlet with a general store, two churches, a school, a wooden fire tower, and a sorghum mill, but changing times and the growth of nearby Cave City gradually drained the community of population. The main highways bypassed Cedar Grove. Beginning in 1926, Highway 25 became the main road between Cord (Independence County) and Strawberry (Lawrence County), with Highway 11 (changed to Highway 167 in 1962) as the main road between Batesville and Cave City. The demolition of the Cedar Grove bridge further isolated the community.

For additional information:
Arms, Orville. “A Brief History of the Cord-Charlotte School District.” Unpublished essay, 1998. On file at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studie,. Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northeast Arkansas. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1889.

A History of Cave City, Arkansas. Mt. Vernon, IN: Windmill Publications, 2001.

McGinnis, A. C. “A History of Independence County, Ark.” Special issue. Independence County Chronicle 17 (April 1976).

Perkey, Gary, ed. A Newspaper History of Cave City, Arkansas: Excerpts from the Sharp County Record, Batesville Guard, Batesville Record, and Newark Journal Newspapers. Batesville, AR: Batesville Genealogical Society, 2003.

Powell, Wilson. “James Family, Cedar Grove Are Intertwined.” River Country, March 6–March 12, 1999, p. 3.

Sandy, Ginger. Special issue on Cedar Grove. Independence County Chronicle 65 (January 2025).

Weinstein, Richard A., David B. Kelley, and Joe W. Saunders, eds. The Louisiana and Arkansas Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

Kenneth Rorie
Van Buren, Arkansas