By Pauline Masson –
Ninety-nine years ago German scientists and engineering experts came to Pacific to test the silica sand deposits here.
It is unclear how they first heard of this place.
A year earlier, in 1925 the Hardstone Brick and Tile Company of Missouri, headquartered in St. Louis, bought land on East Osage that included a large outcropping of silica sand, with plans to build a brick factory here. But it appears they did not yet know what they had.
They invited Franz Triffterer, chief scientist and engineer of Roehrig & Koenig that manufactured a unique heat pressing system for brick makers in Germany, Brussels, Belgium and Russia to come and look at the sand here.
Once Mr Triffterer tested the sand, and looked at the amount of sand that was here, he lost any European high brow restraint and ballyhooed his belief that Pacific brick making would eclipse that in all of Europe.
Pacific’s sand was 98 percent pure silica sand, he told the Pacific folks, which would make a brick far superior to the bricks being made in Europe. He had never seen a source of raw material superior to the one at Pacific. He predicted that orders for Pacific sand would be seen from around the world.
At the behest of Pacific’s legendary town booster Mayor A Koppitz, Mr. Triffterer and John Hahn, president of Hardstone Brick Company were asked to talk with local business leaders. They found themselves in front of a standing room only crowd of Pacific residents at the Royal Theater.
Mr. Triffterer retold his story of the wonders of. Pacific sand and the possibility of producing the hardest brick ever made to the Pacific delegation. He said in Europe cost to manufacture bricks was $12 a thousand, while in Pacific, with no cost to transport building material, the cost would not exceed $7 a thousand. Even though he spoke in German and only a few residents could understand what he said, the crowd cheered enthusiastically.
Pacific had seen its share of crowd pleasing moments before, but the arrival of German industrial barons and their eyeing Pacific’s seemingly never ending supply of high quality silica sand delivered jubilation not seen since the arrival of the railroad.
Mayor Koppitz whipped the town into a frenzy in support of the project.
More than 50 businesses and town leaders, including the mayor, added their names to a full page ad in the local newspaper offering a ‘“Glad-Hand,” to the Hardstone Brick and Tile Company. A series of printed pamphlets and public seminars promised that Hardstone bricks, made with Pacific silica sand, were sure to create an economic boon.
The hype included an invitation for residents to benefit from the surge in revenue by buying stock in the Hardstone Brick and Tile Company at $100 a share, which many did.
A rail spur was laid to the site and carloads of machinery, shipped to the US from Germany, were delivered. Work crews erected an open-air brick factory at the foot of the bluff. A large coal-fired boiler was installed to provide steam for the batching and curing processes. A 200 foot smokestack, some fifteen feet in diameter at the base, was added to provide the natural draft for the boiler. The outdoor plant pressed and baked enough bricks to construct the five-story, 40,000 square foot brick batching plant and adjoining office.
By November 1927 the plant was churning out 50,000 bricks a day.
My friend the late Carl Zitzman, who worked there from 1936 tuntil he was drafted into the Army in 1942, described the plant to me.
It was a complicated building, he recalled. It had five manufacturing levels to accommodate the top-down gravity fed batching and cooking process. Sand and lime – delivered to levels five and four by conveyor – were mixed with water and cooked under steam pressure on level three, then fed into a finishing mixer on level two. The finishing mixer fed the mix into the rotating brick press on the ground level. Everything was operated by levers. Using a switch, the operator controlled exactly how much product to release into the next hopper.
Probably because of his youth, Carl never handled the dynamite that blasted chunks of silica from the bluff face, or the grinder at the back of the plant that reduced it to powder to be lifted by conveyor to the top floor of the batching plant.
Before he moved into the plant, he spent a year removing the bricks from the press by hand, loading them onto a transfer truck – each truck held 1200 bricks – and hand pushing the trucks along the rails into one of the plant’s two baking cylinders. Each cylinder held ten trucks and baked the bricks for twenty-four hours.
William Wolf, proprietor of Pacific Lumber was the first to put in a Hardstone Brick building in Pacific. He was building a new office and display room with a 70 foot frontage on Orleans Street having a plate glass front set in Hardstone brick columns.
Henry Hirth and Lorenz Leber, in the process of replacing their clapboard picture show house on West St. Louis Street with a trendy art deco movie theater, placed an order for Hardstone bricks.
Car man and future mayor Clarence Mayle also opted to build his new repair shop and auto show room at North First and Union streets with Hardstone bricks.
Growth was so substantial that the company found itself strapped for cash and was unable to pay its construction bonds, which caused the plant to be placed in receivership in February 1932 and its doors closed.
The local newspaper editor was heartbroken.
“Much stock in this enterprise is owned by citizens of Pacific as well as people of Washington and Union,” he lamented. “Eighteen men who relied on the plant for their livelihood were out of work.”
But in its brief six years of operation, the company had put too many of the new hard bricks in too many places for the product to die out.
In St. Louis, the Ninth and Chestnut nine-story garage, the Mark Building, the Liquid Carbonic Company dry ice plant, the Mack International Truck Garage, the Grand Leader warehouse, the eight-story Cev-More Garage, seven building at the St. Louis Air Field and five Union Electric Company substations were all built Hardstone bricks manufactured in Pacific.
That wasn’t even half the story. The greatest volume of Hardstone bricks had been used for filling behind face brick or stone cladding in hospitals, department stores, newspapers and churches across St. Louis and St. Louis County.
A new corporation was formed and the plant reopened under the name the Pacific Brick Company in August 1933 with an order for 1,900,000 bricks to be set behind stone cladding in the ten-story U.S. Court and Custom House, aka the New Federal Building, now the Thomas Eagleton Building, at Twelfth and Market Streets in St. Louis.
In September 1940 the firm expanded its product line and began to manufacture concrete blocks, in an astonishing array of dimensions, using the hard brick process and equipment. Throughout the 1940s, business was steady, with biig orders still occasionally coming in. In October 1948 the plant received an order for 1,850,000 bricks for a factory in Illinois.
Concrete Silos
In 1949 Carl Miller took over the building and began to manufacture concrete silos there. He continued to manufacture and sell Hardstone bricks and block up until. In 1953 he was still running the plant.
Calci-Crete
At an uncertain date, Continental Materials Corporation bought the building and began to manufacture Calsi-Crete, another innovation in the building materials industry. The company primarily manufactured panels that were approximately 2- by 8-foot and 3 inches thick, according to Bob Schimsa, who worked there from 1968 to 1972.
Mickey Trost, with the St. Louis Architectural Historical Society, was researching how concrete played a role in housing construction when she came across a product called Calsi-Crete.
A builder named Don McKee discovered the wonders of Calsi-Crete, a product that weighed one-third as much as concrete. He built 24 homes with the miracle product in the community of Winston Park, where Ms. Trost lives.
She came to the Tri-County Senior center to share her research on a unique part of Pacific’s history. Pacific resident Bob Schimsa, who worked in the Pacific plant from 1968 to 1972, was at the meeting. He brought photos of the five-story white building that dominated the east end of Osage for almost a century.
“The plant manufactured two by eight foot panels. They were easy to assemble,” Mr. Schimsa said. “You made a slit in the side and slid a strip of Masonite in to hold them together. The product also was easy to manufacture. A mixture was gravity fed into a metal form and placed in a steam room autoclave with 350 pounds of steam.”
Calsi-Crete did not prove to be the ideal home building material and the Pacific plant was closed.
Duncan Excavating and Ready-Mix
Lloyd Duncan later bought the building and used it as a ready mix plant The enterprising Mr. Duncan continued to manufacture bricks and blocks in the building through the 1990s. He eventually began to rent part of the facility to a sheltered workshop, wood furniture company and a recycling center, but no business emerged that would utilize the entire building and the Duncan family put it on the market.
The five-story factory and its eye catching smokestack had dominated West Osage for 75 years.
Route 66 Business Park
In 2002 Joe Bosse and Phil Zahn bought the old factory and the 10.6 acres to develop the Route 66 Business Park.
In April 21, 2004 work started to knock down the five-story, 40,000-square-foot Hardstone Brick factory/Calsi-Crete/Ready Mix plant, also known as the Duncan property.
U.S.Silica
It turned out that the 1926 German industrialists were accurate in their prediction that orders for Pacific silica sand would come from far and wide.
Today U.S. Silica’s webpage reports that the Pacific plant mines 98.8% whole grain silica sand from the St. Peter’s Formation. The Pacific plant is one of 27 U.S. Silica plants making it the fourth largest silica sand producer in the world, according to industry analysts.
In expansion, the German scientists never dreamed of, U.S. Silica delivers sand for over 1,500 products including construction, recreation, flat glass, glass containers, chemical, foundry, and the oil and gas industries, according to the firm’s website
But those heady days in the 1920s when the town first came to realize what 98 percent pure silica sand meant – it was magic.
Hate to be the bearer of other information, but the 98-99% assay of Pacific St. Peter sandstone was known back into the early 1870s, when the state of Missouri did one of its natural resources studies. Mining and shipping for export started as early as 1853, when the railroad arrived.
Hardstone brick and Calsi-Crete have a fatal flaw: because the sand grains are rounded, the resulting brick becomes porous over time when exposed to water, at a faster rate than brick made from clay. Without protective painting, it crumbles, and sheds sand. Present day pressurized brickmaking procedures and higher industrial temperatures can be used, but those expenses mean sand based brick are less competitive when compared to plain old clay brick.
You’re right, but that doesn’t take away from the 1927 excitement in my story. Geologists knew the purity of the sand in 1870, but they were not manufacturers. People had been making glass from plain old beach sand for two thousand years. A series of early sand mines here supplied sand dug out by hand and delivered in wheelbarrows and by mules for glass makers, maybe as early as 1870. And glassmakers knew that glass made with Pacific sand was very clear. When the German brick makers came here in 1927 with thoughts of a brick factory, they were looking for volume not sand purity. They wondered if the silica outcrop they could see would produce enough sand to make millions of bricks for decades. When they realized it would they were ecstatic. They said over and over they had never seen anything like the volume of sand here in all of Europe. But the epiphany occurred when they held the sand in their hands and it crumbled like fine powder. They tested it and determined its purity. They envisioned a harder brick, superior to the bricks they made with course European sand. They blanketed the town with explanations, written and public, of their bricks and heat pressing equipment.The German’s response wasn’t geology history. It was a moment time. In 1927 there was unarguably no local news that was more interesting than Pacific’s 98 percent pure silica sand. If I were a betting person, I’d bet that Pacific residents didn’t know how pure their sand was until the German brick makers got all excited about it. I always enjoy your input, though. Thanks for chiming in.
Good read. Thank you Pauline Masson, very informative.