Site of the Guarantee State Bank

Ore City's iron plans rode on a railroad. The Handbook of Texas says L. P. Featherstone persuaded the Santa Fe line to finance a rail link to Port Bolivar. By 1914 the Port Bolivar Iron Ore Railway connected Ore City with Longview, about 30 miles. The plan was for ore to reach the Gulf and go on by ship. World War I halted construction before the line could reach Hughes Springs, and the railway was abandoned in 1927.

What the plaque says

Site of the Guarantee State Bank Ore City was founded about 1910 as an iron mining center. On Dec. 16, 1911, its citizens organized the Guarantee State Bank, and after operating temporarily in the local schoolhouse, they built a brick structure on this site in 1912. State Representative W. O. Stamps, the first president, set up farsighted policies during the hard times when the iron mill failed to materialize. Cattle, hogs, mules, and crops figured as loan collateral here as in other Texas farm centers. Renamed the Security State Bank in 1927, the firm erected and moved into a new building nearby in 1968. (1976)

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 — 27 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

• Port Bolivar & Iron Ore Railroad — steps away
• Murry Institute — 0.7 mi
• Old Coffeeville, C. S. A. — 3.5 mi
• Col. John Hamilton McNairy — 3.5 mi