Site of Fraser Brick Company

Duane's take

Here's my telling of the official marker for the Site of Fraser Brick Company, just as the Texas Historical Commission recorded it. Now, some places earn their names in ways you'd never guess just by driving through. Rains County, Texas.

The year is 1905. A young man named Walter B. Fraser decides this particular patch of East Texas earth has something worth pulling out of it, and he builds what would become the first industrial plant Rains County had ever seen.

The Fraser Brick Company. Right here. Employing about forty men, turning out bricks and hollow clay building tile, one of those pioneer Texas factories that showed up before the roads were even decent enough to haul the product away on.

Now here's the part that sticks with you. Four years in, 1909, a post office gets established near the plant. And when the time comes to give it a name, well, the people look around at what defines the place.

Those bricks. That burnt clay. And the color of it, that warm, particular, unmistakable shade, they called it Ginger.

The post office, the community, named for the color of the bricks coming out of Walter Fraser's plant. The operation ran for decades. The business prospered, grew to other Texas locations, and Walter B.

Fraser himself kept at it until he retired in 1944. But the plant right here, this original site, it had a quiet kind of ending. The clay supply neared exhaustion, and sometime in the 1940s, operations ceased.

The earth had given what it had to give. The broader business held on until 1961, when it was sold. Walter B.

Fraser was born in 1877 and lived all the way to 1968. Long enough, you might say, to see nearly everything he built either rise or pass. And that color, that ginger shade of burnt clay brick, it outlasted the factory, outlasted the kilns, outlasted the forty men who worked the floor.

It's still the name on the map.

What the marker says

Here in 1905 Walter B. Fraser (1877-1968) built a pioneer Texas factory which produced bricks and hollow clay building tile. This was the first industrial plant in Rains County and it employed about 40 men. When, in 1909, a post office was established near here, its name "Ginger" was taken from the distinctive color of the burnt clay bricks made at the plant. Operations ceased when this clay supply neared exhaustion in the 1940s. Walter B. Fraser retired in 1944. The business prospered at its other Texas locations until sold in 1961. (1968)