Original Plant of Acme Brick Company

Acme's paperwork said Illinois while its brickyard stood in Texas. Wikipedia says the Acme Pressed Brick Company was chartered on April 17, 1891, in Alton, Illinois, though its plant was always in Texas, southwest of Weatherford. The company town of Bennett had brick homes for about 100 employees, a church, a school and a store. In 1916 stockholders sought a Texas charter, dissolved the Illinois company and renamed it Acme Brick, with George Bennett's son Walter R. Bennett as first president. Berkshire Hathaway bought the company on August 1, 2000.

What the plaque says

Original Plant of Acme Brick Company (4.3 miles northwest) First manufacturer in Texas to make high grade pressed brick. Founded 1891 by industrial pioneer George Bennett (1852-1907), developer of coal mining and other natural resources. Located here because of large deposits of shale near Brazos River. Bennett community grew up around plant, with dormitory and store. The kilns were fired with local fuel; coal, then wood. Brick were shipped out by mule-drawn wagons or nearby Texas & Pacific Railroad. Before 75th anniversary in 1966, Acme became the largest maker of face brick in the United States. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 8.3 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Chandor Gardens — 12 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 26 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Poe Prairie — 0.9 mi
• Brock Methodist Church — 4.3 mi
• Weatherford, Mineral Wells and Northwestern Railway — 7.3 mi
• Jack Llewellyn Knight — 7.4 mi