Port Bolivar & Iron Ore Railroad

Ore City was platted for a boom that did not fully arrive. G. H. Baird's 1946 county history says a company was organized about 1910 to develop the ore, lots sold fast, and the town got a post office, a bank and stores. The ore was not developed as expected, and Baird counts about four hundred residents waiting for it, with six sawmills running. Wikipedia says the town was incorporated in 1951 with 385 people, and that a steel plant built ten miles north in World War II later became Lone Star Steel.

What the plaque says

Port Bolivar & Iron Ore Railroad Though an Antebellum community associated with the Murray League School once existed here, it declined following the Civil War. It wasn't until around 1911, when construction was completed on a railroad, that ore city was platted and residents repopulated the area. Col. L.P. Featherstone, a charter member of the Port Bolivar & Iron Ore Railway Company, was instrumental in connecting Longview (Gregg Co.) and the ore fields of this region. The rail line sparked the town's population and economic growth. Although the freight business slowed and the railroad stopped running in 1926, its operation made a lasting impact on ore city, which continues to thrive today. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Daingerfield State Park — 15 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 22 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 — 22 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.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 26 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

• Site of the Guarantee State Bank — steps away
• Murry Institute — 0.6 mi
• Old Coffeeville, C. S. A. — 3.6 mi
• Col. John Hamilton McNairy — 3.6 mi