The History of Mount Enterprise, Texas

Mount Enterprise was settled in 1832 by the Vinson brothers, and its name captures two things at once: a small elevation — the 'mountain' — near the town, and the business 'enterprise' of the family who put it on the map. Charles Vinson looked at the 'old mountain' nearby and judged it an 'iron mountain,' and he wasn't far wrong: the brown, crumbly ore of the Weches formation that outcrops in the area runs better than fifty percent iron.

But Vinson's real enterprise was manufacturing and trade. His factory turned out wagons, buggies, furniture, plows, caskets, and even a patented churn, and he built a chain of stores — as many as four at one time — to sell them. That blend of industry and commerce gave the young settlement its name and its early reason for being.

The community's formal beginnings came in 1846, when the Mulberry Grove post office was established with Henry Henson as postmaster. Three years later, in 1849, the name was changed to Mount Enterprise. The town took learning seriously for a frontier settlement: the Mount Enterprise Male and Female College operated from 1851 to 1855, followed by a Male and Female Academy.

Lumbering and farming carried the local economy. A furniture factory was running by 1850, and by the 1880 census the town had three sawmills, two cotton gins, a hotel, a school, three churches, and a population of about 150 — a busy little trade center in the timber-and-cotton country of southern Rusk County, with pre–Civil War plantations dotting the surrounding land.

In 1894 the Caro Northern Railway was chartered as a logging road, running about sixteen and a half miles between Mount Enterprise and Caro, in Nacogdoches County, where it tied into the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. As so often happened in East Texas, the town followed the rails: when the line came within reach, Mount Enterprise relocated to meet it, leaving 'old Mount Enterprise' behind.

The railroad era brought a bank, a newspaper, and a full slate of businesses. By the time the town incorporated in 1939, it counted some 920 residents. The logging railroad had closed by 1934, and the population later settled back to the few hundred who live there today. Modern Mount Enterprise is a quiet Piney Woods town of around 500, anchored by its Wildcat schools and its long memory of iron, timber, and the enterprise that named it.