Stories for my grandchildren - Thurber brick

In my home town of Breckenridge, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average, the streets are paved with brick. Well, not all of the streets. Just Walker Street, the main east/west thoroughfare through town. And not even all of that - now only the downtown portion of Walker Street is brick; the rest has been given over to asphalt paving, which you will see is sort of symbolic.

Brick is not as smooth a ride as asphalt. I was reminded what it was like to ride a bicycle down that portion of Walker Street when I saw the cobblestone segments of this year's Tour de France. In some places it would really rattle your teeth. But it is enduring. Oh, my, that stuff lasts and lasts. The bricks in Walker Street were originally laid in the 1920s - they have been there almost 100 years. Try that with your hot-mix asphalt. And Walker street really needed paving in the '20s. Here's a look at conditions back then.

The bricks used to pave Walker street came from Thurber, Texas. If you have driven I-20 between Abilene and Fort Worth, you have passed the almost ghost town of Thurber, marked by the 128 foot tall smoke stack that was part of the electric plant. 

The Thurber story is quite remarkable in itself. Founded in 1888, its primary purpose was to provide coal to the railroads, and provide coal it did. At its peak, the miners brought up 3,000 tons of coal a day from as many as 15 mine shafts. To support the miners (and keep out the unions), Texas and Pacific Coal Company built a company town. The houses were owned by T&P, the stores were owned by T&P, the banks were owned by T&P, the schools were built by T&P, the teachers were paid by T&P, the ice-house, the saloons (and saloon-keepers), the hospital, the 600-seat opera house, the cemetery, the four church buildings, the hotels, the library... all owned by T&P. At one time 10,000 people representing 20 different nationalities lived in Thurber. 

Oh, and the brick plant was owned by T&P and Thurber brick paved many streets west of the Mississippi - including Camp Bowie Boulevard in Forth Worth,  streets in Dallas, Houston, Beaumont, Congress Avenue in my current home town, and of course Walker Street. It was used to build the Galveston seawall, the Fort Worth Stockyards, The Dallas Opera House and many, many Texas and Pacific Railway stations. It was even used to pave an experimental highway between Belton and Temple, one of the very first paved highways in the nation. It consisted of two tracks, each track only two bricks wide to accommodate skinny auto tires of the day. I don't know what you did when you met someone coming the other way.

A Thurber "paver." The little triangle in the center? The union "bug" added when Thurber became the only 100% unionized closed-shop city in the nation, after a period of chaotic strikes and lock-outs. So much for the company town keeping the union out.

And why is Thurber a ghost town today? Because Texas and Pacific Coal Company drilled for oil just a few miles south near Ranger, and soon became Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company. The need for coal dwindled almost immediately; the brick manufacturing lasted until the 1930's (by that time the brick kilns were oil-fired) but eventually petroleum-based asphalt supplanted the need for paving bricks. They're collectors items now. But I know where there are a few thousand - if you can dig them up without getting caught or run over.