our history: ACME BRICK BENNETT
By MEL W RHODES
B
64
Major US brick producer traces its
roots to a plant alongside Rock Creek
in Southeastern Parker County
ring up “brick” in a conversation, and chances
are the name “Acme” will soon follow. The
Acme name is virtually synonymous with brick,
and understandably so, considering that by the mid-
20th century, Acme Brick grew to become the largest
US-owned brick manufacturer and the first to offer a
100-year warranty on their products. This 127-year-old
company with numerous plants in several US states traces
its roots right back here to Parker County.
The man who would first discover the requisite raw
materials and then build a brick plant on Rock Creek
some 18 miles southwest of Weatherford was George E.
Bennett. Bennett, born in Springfield, Ohio, on Oct. 6,
1852, left home at 16, making his way to St. Joseph, MO,
where he worked for a wholesaler named James McCord.
By 1874 he was in Butler, MO., running his own busi-
ness. When the economy went south in the mid-1870s,
so did Bennett. He arrived in Galveston in 1876.
In 1877, Bennett moved to Dallas where he worked for
McCormick Reaper and Harvester Co. His ambition soon
earned him the title and responsibilities of state sales
manager. He left that job in 1884 to become general
manager of Dallas’s Tomkins Implement Company.
In his late 30s, the industrious Mr. Bennett became
interested in brick-making and began scouting out loca-
tions where the needed materials such as clay might be
plentiful. The banks of Rock Creek in Parker County fit
the bill and in 1890, he bought three 160-acre tracts and
built his brick plant. When his test bricks received a supe-
rior rating, the operation fired up. The brick produced
were of the hard-fired variety, bricks fired in a kiln at
high temperatures to increase strength and durability and
improve moisture and weather resistance.
Bennett’s Acme Pressed Brick Co. was chartered on
April 17, 1891, in Alton, Ill. When he opened the doors,
he had more orders than he could fill. With plenty of
business, in 1894 Bennett built a second plant across the
railroad tracks. The small community of Lakota where
Bennett built changed its name to Bennett.
The Bennett plant’s first big jobs began in 1902 with the
building of the Armour and Swift meat-packing plants in
the Fort Worth Stockyards area. Much of Cowtown was
built with brick from the Bennett facility.
George Bennett died in 1907 at age 54 while in
Galveston on business. According to Acme, Ralph S. Root
then became president of the company. The next year
a strike shut down operations for a short time. A finan-
cial panic in the fall of 1910 and the lingering effects
of the strike brought on layoffs and closure of the plant.
However, in December, when fire destroyed much of
Midland, the plant reopened to produce the massive
amounts of brick needed to rebuild that West Texas city.