Mims Chapel, Marion County

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Mims Chapel is a town in Marion County in the east of the American state of Texas .

geography

Mims Chapel is about ten kilometers southeast of the small town of Avinger on the FM 729 road on the north bank of the Lake O 'the Pines reservoir . To the north is the scattered settlement of Warlock .

history

The Mims Chapel settlement was probably built after 1843, after a wooden church at this point, which was initially known as The Rock Church because of its location near a striking rock and was later named after the two brothers John W. and Henry Mims, who formed the new Methodist parish actively supported them in their first years. In 1847, the planter Jefferson S. Nash built a blast furnace in the new settlement , the first in all of Texas, to advance the exploitation of iron ore deposits in the region. Within ten years, around 5 tons of pig iron were extracted here, which were processed into, among other things, car bodies and heating stoves, and at the time of the Civil War also cannonballs for the Confederate army . However, the venture soon proved to be unprofitable; Applications for state aid were repeatedly rejected. Towards the end of the war, the plant was sold to the George A. Kelly Iron Company, which stopped production and shipped the moveable inventory to Jefferson . Only the furnace itself remained in Mims Chapel and was visibly deteriorating.

Around 1890 Mims Chapel had around 25 residents, had a general supplies store and was the seat of a justice of the peace. A post office was set up in 1852, but closed again in 1906. Mims Chapel was also the capital of a school district with two segregated schools for white and black students. The school statistics also show that African-Americans made up the majority of the population at that time, with 50 white and 93 black students enrolled in 1907. In 1955 the schools in the school district of Lassater were opened. According to the Texas State Historical Association's Handbook of Texas , the site was a dispersed settlement in the 1960s , but had two churches, a cemetery, and a rodeo course. In 1959 the construction of the dam on Big Cypress Creek was completed. Since the reservoir filled up, Mims Chapel has been on the shores of Lake O'the Pines and now also has a park on the lake shore, a boat dock and, a little further south, an airfield; the Methodist Church that gave the place its name still exists.

Current data on population development are not available because Mims Chapel is not recorded as a statistical unit by the United States Census Bureau .

literature

Web links

Coordinates: 32 ° 51 ′  N , 94 ° 38 ′  W