Buried in the cemetery is Alfred Wright, a physician and missionary to the Choctaw Native Americans.

Until the church building was completed, the services were held outdoors under a large oak tree.

He added a large room to the latter, where his wife, Harriet Bunce Wright, and teacher Anna Burnham[a] could teach local Choctaw children, using a day school format.

This would continue until 1839, and would become the nearby Wheelock Academy, a boarding school, which the Choctaw Council sanctioned as a girls' seminary in 1842.

Financed by donations and constructed by volunteer laborers (mostly Choctaw), it has 20 inches (0.51 m)-thick stone walls and a vaulted ceiling over the main floor and balcony.

[3] [c] Wright was often absent from the pulpit because, as the only person in the area trained in medicine, he would ride out to the home of any one who he heard was ill.

[2] Harriet struggled to keep the mission and school operating, but her own health began failing about a year after Alfred's death.

In 1861, after the Choctaw Nation formally allied itself with the Confederate States of America, becoming a belligerent state in the American Civil War, the ABM ordered Edwards to leave Indian Territory and return to the North.