Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 January 1887 — THE SOUTH. [ARTICLE]

THE SOUTH.

An explosion of gas in the coal bunkers of the British steamer Suez, at New Orleans, fatally burned the second engineer and three Chinese firemen, and dangerously burned three other Chinese. Exhaustive reports from all the iron and steel plants in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky. Maryland, Missouri. North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia disclose a most remarkable development in the iron industry in the Sonth. Since the census of 1880, 565,200 tons have been added to their annunl capacity for iron manufacture. Six blast furnaces are now being built in Alabama and two in Tennessee. A Momur. dispatch says: “The steamboat Bradish Johnson, used as a boardinghouse at Jackson, Ala., where the West Alabama Railroad bridge is building, was burned. Two whites—Otis McIlroy, of Mobile, and Dan Milhouse, of New York — are missing, and two negroes—Lewis Adams and Ben Bush—were drowned. It is believed that ten others, all negroes, perished in the flames and ten others drowned.” The orange crop of Louisiana is said to be but one-tenth of an average, and none will be shipped to the Northern States. The parish of Plaquemines, very near the mouth of the Mississippi, is said to be the only safe and profitable field in the State for the orange. Some large plantations in that section are being converted into groves.... The judges of twenty-one counties in the drought-afflicted region of Texas met at Albany and issued an appeal to the country at large for $500,000 with which to relieve thirty thousand destitute persons.