Booker City

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Booker City was a short-lived project to develop a town for middle-class African American residents on a 140-acre site on the St Louis–San Francisco Railway north of Ensley.

E. W. Whips founded the Booker City Land Company, named for famed Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington, and began marketing sites for sale.

In 1901 he negotiated the sale of 20 acres, and donated an additional 10 acres, to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church for construction of a new industrial and normal school, initially called Booker College or Booker City High School. Over the course of the next year, as construction of a dormitory proceeded, exploratory shafts were drilled in the area by the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company (TCI).

Booker College opened in late 1902 and soon merged with another CME school in Thomasville, Clarke County to become Miles Memorial College. In 1907 TCI acquired the CME's Booker City property in exchange for a 30-acre site in their planned new city of Corey (now Fairfield). Over the next decade TCI redeveloped the former Booker City into a "model mining village" which it named Docena.

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