Bennett Plant

Texas in the late 1800s was a land of limitless opportunity for those with the drive to pursue it. One of those go-getters was George Ellis Bennett, Acme Brick Company’s founder. In 1888, at the age of 36, Bennett saw a booming demand for building materials and set out to meet it, by establishing the state’s first dry-press brick manufacturer. He spent the next two years crisscrossing the region in search of suitable raw materials, water, fuel, access to transportation, and labor. Ultimately Bennett found all these essentials just west of Fort Worth, along a tributary of the Brazos River – and immediately set to work building a brick plant on the site. Following a series of successful tests, the “Acme Pressed Brick Company” was chartered on April 17, 1891.

Bennett’s first plant was a low-tech operation. Miners used dynamite and black powder to harvest the shale, which was hauled by horse or mule to the plant – where steam-driven equipment ground the shale and molded it into brick. “Tossers” and “setters” meticulously stacked the pressed brick inside a periodic (“beehive”) kiln. After firing, the brick were unloaded, stacked and prepared for shipping – nearly always by rail.

To house the company’s workers, a small company town soon sprang up around the plant. In time, the town of Bennett came to include a church, general store, school, barber shop, lake, movie house, and hotel.

Successful from the start, by 1894, Acme had already outgrown its original facility. Bennett built a new, larger plant across Rock Creek, which could produce 75,000 brick per week. A bright future was in store.

Acme’s first big breakthrough occurred in late 1901, when Fort Worth landed two meat processing plants in its stockyards. Construction triggered the largest orders in the young company’s history – and as they would prove time and again in the decades to come, the workers of the Bennett Plant rose to the occasion, producing an unheard-of two million brick a month to meet demand.

The plant’s next big inflection point came in 1910. Facing multiple headwinds including a financial panic that had halted construction, George Bennett’s son Walter shut down the plant and left the keys with the timekeeper, J. Ernest Fender. While Bennett was away, Fender heard from a railroad conductor that a fire had decimated the West Texas city of Midland. Fender grabbed an order book, caught the next train to Midland, and returned with enough brick orders to reopen the plant.

Also around this time, Acme made its first acquisition, of the Denton Pressed Brick Company. This expansion prompted the company to relocate its headquarters from a one-room structure in Bennett to downtown Fort Worth – which has been its corporate home ever since.

In December 1913, the Bennett Plant converted from dry-press to stiff-mud operation. Gone were the old Boyd brick presses, though the plant continued to employ horse and mule power for several more years – and Acme continued to fire brick in beehive kilns at Bennett until the early 2020s.

Bennett Plant has received continual capital improvement over the years. New kilns added in 1956 increased the plant’s capacity by 20 percent. Twenty years later, a second wave of improvements nearly doubled the plant’s capacity. In the 1990s, Bennett installed its first continuous “tunnel” kiln, eventually phasing out and scrapping its periodic kilns. And even after 130 years of brick manufacturing, Acme’s original plant still has enough raw material available to produce brick for many decades to come. 

Bennett Plant has also been an incubator for production management talent. Many of Acme’s senior production managers have honed their skills at the plant.

Today the Bennett Plant is one of 15 brick plants in the Acme system. Yet thanks to the commitment of its managers, the dedication of its associates, and the quality of its products, in many respects it remains Acme’s flagship.