Middlesex Brick & Tile Works 1883

In the 1850s, Charles Mears opened ports and built sawmills, developing towns along the lakeshore. Twenty-five years later, seeing the potential in making bricks for the Chicago market, Mears opened a brick-making company using a sediment clay deposit nearly a mile long on the north bank of Pentwater Lake. It wasn’t the first. Both Elihu B. Burrington in 1862 and F. O. Gardner in the 1870s produced brick on the banks of Pentwater Lake. In 1883, with backing from Chicago investors, Charles Mears incorporated the Middlesex Brick & Tile Company with $60,000 capital. Company directors included Mears, W.E. Ambler, Fred Nielsen, F.O. Gardner, and Harvey Cockell of Chicago, who managed the business. They built docks, buildings, and a tugboat. Like several Michigan communities, including Traverse City and Grand Rapids, the company produced a common brick described as creme, considered fashionable in the day.

The color resulted from compounds in the clay in a ratio of iron oxide (one part) to lime (at least three parts). The lime bleached the red from the iron. The first year’s bricks were inferior due to an experimental drying process using an artificial heat source to speed the drying process. A year later, on April 19, 1884, a fire destroyed the plant and equipment. A new manager, Henry Hurley, rebuilt the works and manufactured a high-quality brick using a natural process to cure the bricks by weather undercover and transferring them to the kilns to bake. The company employed 80 to 100 men during the summer months and produced about 6,000,000 bricks that sold well in Chicago markets. Builders used the creme bricks after wood frame businesses on Hancock Street were lost in the fire of 1889, including the General Store and Masonic Temple, now the Gustafson Building, the Village Hall, Girard Building, the south wing of the Pentwater School, torn down in 1966, and the rebuilding of the church that is now the Pentwater Historical Museum. Pentwater bricks also built the Armour (grain) Elevator in Chicago. In 1930, George Birdsey salvaged Pentwater brick from the old Valeria Hotel to build the Hancock Building and Miracle Theater.

Hurley died in 1889, and a few years later, the business was bankrupt. Charles Mears brought a suit against the company in U.S. Circuit Court on October 30, 1891. U.S. Marshall Clarke traveled from Grand Rapids to Pentwater in February 1892 to close the business and sell the property for Mears after he won a court judgment. Mears realized only $23,000 for the plant and real estate and $1,430 for the personal property. By the early 1900s, village children were playing in the abandoned brickworks.

Sources:  “The Candlewyk House,” Pentwater Pride, Pentwater Historical Society Fall 2018.  “Closed out the Plant,” Grand Rapids Herald 2/6/1892. “Old School Building Coming Down” by Leonore P. Williams Ludington Daily News 4/5/1966.  “Reminiscences of Pentwater” by Leonore P. Williams, Ludington Daily News 8/19/1947.  “Sued a Business Company,” Grand Rapids Press 10/30/1891. “A. Living artifact,” Pentwater Pride, Pentwater historical Society Spring 2018. “Memories of “Michigan Statements,” Weekly Expositor (Brockway Center, Michigan) 8/4/1892.  Memories of Stewart McKibben, Pentwater School Superintendent in “Reminiscences of Pentwater by Lenore P. Williams, Ludington Daily News, 7/14/1888.  “Village is Two Units During Boom Days” by Lenore P. Williams, Ludington Daily News 7/31/1968.