Early Site of Bell Factory

George Addison Kelly joined the foundry at Four Mile Branch in 1852, became a partner in 1858 and sole owner in 1860, and developed the Blue Kelly Plow. In the Civil War the company supplied the Confederacy with plows, utensils and cast-iron cannonballs. By 1880 the Handbook lists his Kelly Iron Works as the state's leading producer of agricultural implements. After a fire and the loss of cheap river transport when the Red River Raft was removed, he closed Kellyville in 1882 and moved to Longview. The Kelly family still ran the firm in 1950, without outside financing.

What the plaque says

Early Site of Bell Factory From a log blacksmith shop in 1854 grew a bell foundry owned by G. A. Kelly which manufactured cowbells widely used by pioneer ox-team freighters. Later the Kelly plow, one of the first modern plows made in Texas, was manufactured here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jefferson Historical Museum — 3.9 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.
• Excelsior House Hotel — 3.9 mi
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 15 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 16 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.

More markers nearby

• Berea Community — 2.0 mi
• John M. Vines — 3.5 mi
• Richard Waterhouse — 3.6 mi
• First Baptist Church of Jefferson — 3.7 mi