Peek Into Panola
By Vina Lee
Mineral Springs, part of the piney woods of northwestern Panola County, was named for a spring, which early residents believed to have medicinal waters. African-Americans built a place to worship in the 1870s before the Texas, Sabine Valley, and Northwestern Railway was built through the area in 1888. It was a flagged stop where lumber was shipped from the woods.The stop was discontinued before 1910 and by 1948 the church had collapsed, the woods taking over where the town once thrived. It is now a ghost town. Whether ghosts wander the narrow gnarled pathways, I do not know, but families once grew there, wrote their life stories on blank pages of their futures and dreamed big dreams.
I live near Long Branch southwest. It was first settled before the Civil War and was named for the long sandy arm of Murvaul Bayou. A post office was established in 1858, and a Baptist church in 1874. A. P. Wherry built a gristmill in 1880 and by 1885 Long Branch had a church, a district school, five cotton gins, two sawmills, a general store, and a population of 100. Around 1900 the Ragley lumber company built a narrow-gauge logging railroad between Timpson and Henderson, running it through Long Branch. By 1914, it had Baptist and Methodist churches, a bank, a weekly newspaper and a population of 400. The town began to decline when the timber was depleted and the Timpson and Henderson Railway took over over the narrow-gauge line in 1909 abandoning it by 1923 leading to a declining of citizens. By1925 the population had fallen to 175 closing the post office the next year. In the mid-1930s Long Branch still had a church, a school and eight businesses and 174 residents in 1936. After World War II, its school was consolidated with that of Carthage, and most of its stores closed. In 1990 Long Branch was considered a dispersed rural community, with a church, a store, a community center, and a reported population of 181 in 2000.