New Mine

New Mine is on Farm Road 1519 three miles southwest of Pittsburg in central Camp County. The community grew up around the New Mine Baptist Church, organized on September 11, 1892. By 1897 the settlement also had a one-room, one-teacher, ungraded school that served a scholastic population of sixty-eight White children. By 1908 the community also had a cotton gin. New Mine was a dispersed farming community whose residents depended heavily on cotton for their livelihood. It never had a post office, and no population estimates were ever recorded. By 1935 the school was called Oakley, and it offered the first seven grades to fifty-one White children of school age. The board of the common school district also controlled the Living Green Community School, a school two miles southwest that offered the first eight grades to 102 Black children. Both schools had two teachers. During the late 1930s the population of the area began to decline as farms were gradually converted from cotton to livestock. By 1955 the schools had been consolidated with the Pittsburg Independent School District, and by 1983 New Mine consisted of the church, a cemetery, and a few widely scattered houses.