Cedar Lake, Alabama

The Louisville & Nashville Railway president Mr Smith offered aid to support the founding and promised to setup a depot and side tracks as well as offering shipping concessions.[2] Mrs Lilian K. Ray founded the community in 1897 in an experiment to determine how well a black community could self-govern.[4][5] The town was run as a regular corporation with elected officers.[2] A local congressman, Joseph Wheeler, made arrangements to open a mail station.[6] The Alabama Governor Joseph F. Johnston appointed a notary, a justice and police constable all from the black community.[6] Booker T. Washington took an interest in the new colony and gave material aid.[6]

The establishment of the community gained interest across the county[4] and was written about in The New York Times in the November 14 edition a few days after inauguration.[3]

The founder Mrs Ray was described as being a wealthy English woman[2] and well known in both literary and financial circles.[3] She had come to America from England around three years prior and owned an elegant home in Moulton Heights, Alabama where she had retired too.[3] She was a writer who wrote under the alias of Jack Carleton.[3] She stated that the new colony was not a 'business speculation' and was just an attempt to improve the lives of the black community.[3] She gave money for the founding of a school and a church which the community built themselves and who ordained a Baptist preacher in the church.[3] She also donated $10,000 for the building of 140 houses and then any other practical purpose.[3]

A firm from Providence, Alabama agreed to build a cotton mill with twenty thousand spindles and other firm had agreed than if tobacco was profitable grown they would setup a cigar and tobacco factory.[3]

Governor Robert Love Taylor expressed an interest to Mrs Kay of making a similar colony in Tennessee.[3]

Plans for the community came under bigoted attacks with white supremacists questioning plans for self government in an African American community. "Trying to teach a negro self-government is like casting pearls before the swine", was one statement among several other extremely negative aspersions.[7]

In 1908 it was listed as having a post office.[8] In the 1920s, Monroe Work's Negro Yearbooks reported it had 300 residents. A Rosenwald school for the community was announced in February 1920 with T. C. Parks a prominent black educator from Huntsville donating $500 to be matched by Julius Rosenwald.[9] Cartie Tate Lewis served as its principal of the two-room schoolhouse.[4]

Johnson's Pond provided acted as both the main water source for the settlement but also offered recreational opportunities for picnics, fishing, swimming and also for baptisms.[4]

By 1939 Cedar Lake had grown to 1200 acres located south of Alabama State Route 67 and was annexed into Decatur in 1967.[4]