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Perhaps
most Southeast Texans know very little about Texas' earliest attempts
at iron-smelting, most of which was at a place in Cherokee
County, appropriately named New
Birmingham. Actually iron-smelting in Texas goes back to 1846
at Alley's Mill, but the furnace in use there was quite minute compared
to the Tassie Bell or Star and Crescent furnaces at New
Birmingham, which produced 100 tons daily of pig iron.
The source of the metal was the iron oxide or red ocher (hematite)
beds that blanketed much of the "Redlands," which is a very low grade
ore. Since there were no adjacent coal mines, huge quantities of the
neighboring forests had to be reduced to charcoal to heat the furnaces.
New
Birmingham owed its origin to A. B. Blevins, a Birmingham, Ala.,
sewing machine salesman, who first studied the red ocher outcroppings
and enticed Eastern bankers to invest in iron production there. In
1888 the Cherokee Land and Iron Co. built the Star and Crescent furnace,
followed quickly by the Tassie Bell furnace, owned by the New Birmingham
Iron Co. Both furnaces required huge amounts of charcoal, much of
which was made by the state penal camps along the Texas
State Railroad to Palestine.
By 1890 New Birmingham seemed destined to become the leading city
of Cherokee
County, and large expenditures of money were observed everywhere
in the city. The entire business district consisted of brick buildings.
With a population of 1,500 people, it quickly acquired 300 new homes,
depots of both the Cottonbelt and Palestine railroads, an electric
light system, a pipe foundry, churches and schools, a bottling works,
the Berkshire Sash and Door Co., a bank, the New Birmingham Plow Works,
two sawmills, and a newspaper named the New Birmingham Times.
Its most palatial building was the 75-room, three-story Southern Hotel,
which boasted of its society balls and hot and cold running water.
Its surviving register still bears the names of presidents Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, who perhaps campaigned there, and
also that of Texas governors.
Ultimately the New Birmingham experiment would have failed anyway
because of the low-grade ore and lack of coal mines. However the underlying
causes of failure were the financial panic of 1893 and the Texas Alien
Land Law, which prevented foreign investment there. The immediate
cause was the explosion, which wrecked the Tassie Bell furnace and
the owner's refusal to rebuild it.
Old-timers of that era, however, maintained it was the "red-haired
woman's curse"—that "no stick or stone will be left standing"—that
destroyed the city.
In 1892 former Confederate Gen. W. H. Hammon and his beautiful wife
were the socialite leaders of the town and resided at the Southern
Hotel. Soon a young newly wed husband and his gorgeous raven-haired
bride came to town, and quite a rivalry developed between the two
beautiful women. Afterward Gen. Hammon was murdered, and when the
newly-wed husband was charged with the offense, his red-haired bride
supposedly ran through the business district, screaming her "curse."
After the town disappeared, only the dilapidated Southern Hotel still
stood until 1926, when it too burned down, destroying the last "stick"
that was still standing. And true to the "curse," New
Birmingham's location has returned to the forest that spawned
it, and hardly a "stick or a stone" of the old townsite remains standing
today. |
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