Cherokee County Once Tried to Build an Iron City

Southeast of Rusk, Anderson B. Blevins and the Cherokee Land and Iron Company looked at local ore and imagined a manufacturing city. New Birmingham rose during the iron rush of the late 1880s. Within a few years, several thousand people lived around two furnaces and a brick business district.

This was more than a camp beside a smokestack. Fifteen brick business blocks held banks, an ice factory, an electric plant, a pipe foundry, a school, and the three-story Southern Hotel. A street railway connected the town with Rusk. For a brief moment, local ore, timber, transportation, and outside money seemed ready to build an East Texas iron center.

Then the money thinned out. The Panic of 1893 was followed by an explosion and fire at the Tassie Belle furnace, costing about 300 jobs. The post office lasted until 1906, but the whole town was abandoned by 1910. A state marker and furnace ruins now hold the outline of a place that rose quickly enough to get electric lights, then disappeared.