09/29/2026
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HISTORY OF TEXARKANA: One House Is All That Remains of Texarkana’s Historic Iron Mountain Neighborhood
On a quiet street in Texarkana, Arkansas, stands a house that is much more than an old home.
According to Arkansas Heritage, it is the only remaining structure from Texarkana’s late-1800s African American neighborhood known as the Iron Mountain Addition.
Located at 111 Pinehurst Street, the Rev. Lee James House dates to around 1899 and was built as a boarding house for working-class residents employed by the railroad.
To understand why it matters, you have to go back to the railroad boom that created much of early Texarkana.
Between 1882 and 1888, nine railway lines were centered in Texarkana. One of them was the Iron Mountain Railway, which owned much of the land in this area. Many of the homes constructed in the neighborhood were occupied by railroad employees.
The community became known as the Iron Mountain Addition.
Arkansas Heritage records that the neighborhood’s population was predominantly African American, although the neighborhood itself was integrated. It included homes, a family-owned grocery store and several African American churches.
One of those churches was Lonoke Baptist Church, where Rev. Lee James served as pastor from about 1917 to 1923.
The house on Pinehurst had originally been constructed as a boarding house to provide housing for working African American families. Over the decades, the building underwent extensive alterations, but its basic form survived.
The neighborhood around it changed.
Iron Mountain eventually became known as the Pine Hill Addition, and the buildings that once made up the old neighborhood gradually disappeared or were replaced.
But the Rev. Lee James House remained.
In 1998, the house was listed on the Arkansas Register of Historic Places because of its connection to Texarkana’s early African American community and the railroad workers who helped build the city.
Arkansas Heritage’s official documentation describes it as the only structure remaining from the late-19th-century African American neighborhood of Iron Mountain.
More than 125 years after it was built, the house still stands at 111 Pinehurst Street.
Thousands of railroad workers helped turn Texarkana from a collection of tents and tracks into a growing city.
For one of those early neighborhoods, this house is what remains.
Source: Arkansas Heritage, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Rev. Lee James House, Arkansas Register of Historic Places, listed December 2, 1998.
History of Texarkana | Metro Texarkana News & Reports
