Kedron's name comes directly from the brook, named by German Moravian missionaries who formed a settlement near Nundah in 1838 to protect local Aboriginal people, taking the name from the biblical Kedron River. Local shopkeeper and postman John King adopted the Kedron name for the locality in the early 1890s. Early settlers included the Barron family, who arrived in 1856, and Judge Alfred Lutwyche, who bought 50 acres in 1862 and built his residence, Kedron Lodge. A wooden bridge carried traffic over the brook from around 1875, a tram line reached it by 1914, and Brisbane City Council replaced it with a new bridge in 1927.

For much of its history, Kedron Brook itself was a working waterway rather than a scenic one: farms and tanneries lined its banks, and the pollution got bad enough to draw formal complaints. The Kedron Park Hotel, built in 1880, brought a different kind of activity to the area: its proprietor started horse races, polo matches and sports days at Kedron Park, and in 1911 the colourful figure John Wren acquired the park as an unregistered pony track. The district's local government, the Kedron Shire, was formed in 1903 with offices at Chermside, before Brisbane City Council absorbed it in the 1925 amalgamation.

Kedron's population dipped from 12,133 in 2006 to 9,907 in 2021, even as its apartment stock grew by 50% over the past decade, a sign of the suburb's shift toward denser, multi-unit living. That brook, still running through the suburb, continues to define termite risk the way it always has: properties closest to it deal with persistently damp soil, while the suburb's newer apartment buildings bring a different kind of pest management need entirely, more akin to strata and common-area hygiene than a standard house inspection.