OAK RIDGE, TEXAS (Grayson County). Oak Ridge is a small rural community located on Farm Road 120 about seven miles east of Denison in northeastern Grayson County. This settlement, just west of the Red River and the Oklahoma border, was named for the trees and topography in the region and probably began by the 1880s. The oldest grave in the local cemetery is that of Ann Messenger who died in 1882. The Messenger family, early settlers, donated the land for a Methodist church. Another landowner, John Scott, gave property for a Baptist church. By the late 1800s or early 1900s the Oak Ridge School served area families as well as students from the nearby community of Carpenters Bluff. Highway maps of the 1930s and 1940s showed the school, cemetery, and a church. Sometime after this the school closed. In the latter half of the twentieth century Oak Ridge still appeared on county highway maps. In 2000 the population was 161.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ancestors and Descendants: Grayson County, Texas (Sherman, Texas: Grayson County Genealogical Society, 1980). Grayson County Frontier Village, History of Grayson County, Texas (2 vols., Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Hunter, 1979, 1981).

Laurie E. Jasinski