Mackey Brick and Tile Manufacturing Company

Wages at the Calaveras brickworks were a dollar a day for laborers and two dollars a cord for woodcutters, with company housing at seventy-five cents a week. Most workers came from local Spanish-speaking and Mexican families, and a surviving five-cent Mackey token shows what they were paid in. As timber ran out, the kilns turned to lignite from Lytle, and the woodcutters organized for better pay. By 1897 the works stood idle from overproduction. After Mackey died in 1898, one local history says, the sale of his assets by his last investor, William Marsh Rice, helped fund Rice Institute.

What the plaque says

Mackey Brick and Tile Manufacturing Company Nelson Mackey (1825-1898), founder of Texas-based Mackey Brick Company, was born Nelson Mackey Laraway in Catskill, New York. He grew up in the Hudson Valley where the name Mackey was synonymous with brick manufacturing. After business ventures in Iowa and Illinois, Mackey came to the San Antonio area in the late 1870s. By the 1880s, he began to invest in a brick manufacturing company that would eventually become one of the most successful in the state. In 1887, he and several partners acquired land around Calaveras. Of this tract, 150 acres were set aside for the mining of clay for brick making, and the remaining acreage supplied the necessary 30,000 cords of wood needed to fire kilns. Mackey's employees had the choice to live on-site in company housing. Workers were paid in tokens that were redeemable at the company store. The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad created a spur named the Mackey spur to pick up bricks on-site. With transportation readily available, Mackey bricks were soon shipped across southern Texas. The buff-colored bricks were used to build various downtown San Antonio businesses, as well as landmarks such as the foundation of the Federal Building, an addition to the Menger Hotel and the Vance Building. Bricks were also used in construction outside of San Antonio. In 1891, the Southwest Texas State Lunatic Asylum was constructed using seven million Mackey bricks. Mackey often pointed out that if lined end-to-end, they would have reached from San Antonio to Chicago. In 1889, the company added "tile" to their name and produced red clay pipe from a quarry south of San Antonio. Unfortunately, because of fierce competition with south Texas and Mexican brick companies, the business declined by the late 1890s. Mackey passed away in 1898 and is buried in Perry, Iowa. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 14 mi
  The southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
• Mission San Juan — 15 mi
  The mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.
• San Antonio Missions National Historical Park — 17 mi
  Four working parish churches on the Mission Trail south of downtown, with the visitor center at Mission San Jose, the Queen of the Missions, and the descendants who still worship there.
• Mission Concepción — 19 mi
  A stone church dedicated in 1755 that has never fallen into ruin, its convento ceilings still painted, and the ground where the Texas Revolution's fight for San Antonio began.

More markers nearby

• Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church — 3.2 mi
• Casa Blanca — 5.4 mi
• Near Site of Lodi Ferry — 6.8 mi
• Rancho de Pataguilla — 6.8 mi