Shady Grove

Toco, a farming community on U.S. Highway 82 six miles west of Paris in western Lamar County, was settled sometime before 1900 and was originally known as Shady Grove. During the mid-1930s Shady Grove had a church, a school, a cemetery, and a number of houses; several stores were also in the vicinity. Beginning around the 1970s, the community became known as Toco, though older locals still sometimes called the area Shady Grove. The stores and school closed after World War II, but later the number of residents increased. In 1990 Toco was a dispersed rural community with an estimated population of 191. The population dropped to eighty-nine in 2000.