DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the voice along for the ride. Now, picture this: you're standing in Erath County, out where the town of Thurber used to hum and clatter and breathe. And it all starts, as the best Texas stories do, with one man lookin' at the ground and seein' something nobody else bothered to notice.
W. K. Gordon was the general manager of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, and where most folks saw plain old shale mud, Gordon saw possibility.
That particular brand of vision, friend, is either genius or stubbornness, and in Texas the two are often the same thing. Gordon took what he saw in that Thurber shale and walked it straight to the company president, a man named R. D.
Hunter, and made his case. Whatever he said worked, because in 1897 Hunter gave the go-ahead and a brick plant went up right here. Now the original machinery was something to behold.
Three Ross-Keller brick presses, all of them fed by a Corliss steam engine. That engine had a name, because of course it did. They called it Old Hunter, after the man who said yes to the whole venture.
The operation spread across five acres and kept eight hundred men employed. Eight hundred. That is not a workforce, that is a small city with a singular purpose, and that purpose was brick.
And those bricks went everywhere. They paved roads across Texas. You want names?
Old Bankhead Highway, which you might know as US 80. Congress Avenue up in Austin. Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth.
And then there is this one, the one that really ought to stop you cold: the Galveston Seawall. Brick made right here in Thurber, holding back the Gulf of Mexico. The plant ran hard for decades before it closed in 1931.
The machinery went quiet, the five acres went still, and the shale mud that started it all just waited in the ground the way it always had. But those roads and that seawall, they are still out there. Every time you drive a stretch of old US 80, you might just be rolling over a piece of Thurber.
What the marker says
Texas and Pacific Coal Company general manager W. K. Gordon, seeing potential in the shale mud found in Thurber, persuaded company president R. D. Hunter to build a brick plant here in 1897. Original machinery included three Ross-Keller brick presses powered by a Corliss steam engine nicknamed "Old Hunter." The operation covered five acres and employed 800 men. Brick manufactured here was used to pave roads throughout Texas, including old Bankhead Highway (US 80), Austin's Congress Avenue, Fort Worth's Camp Bowie Boulevard, and the Galveston Seawall. The plant closed in 1931. (1995)