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~ Brickyard
~ ~ Brickmaking
~ ~ Brick and Tile Company
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As the last Ice Age retreated from the valleys of the Okanagan,
Thompson and Shuswap, it left behind a litter of sand, silt, gravel and clay. Much of the
clay was impure, laced with glacial debris, but in some locations there were deposits of
pure clay. One such place was on the banks of the Shuswap
River near Enderby where European settlers soon applied their knowledge of brickmaking
to the clay.
The federal Department of Mines Geological Survey of 1912 stated that bricks made from this clay had a good hard red body, and that they could be burned hard enough to use for lining sewers where a non-absorbent brick was required. With exuberant boosterism, Enderby brickmakers claimed they had the best brick in the province.
It is not clear who first started the brickmaking business in Enderby. In 1891 The Vernon News, in its first year of publication, mentioned the Enderby Brick Yard. It was owned by Messrs. Marwood and Perry and employed a Chinese crew. Frank Marwood also had a blacksmith business which he sold in April of 1892 to William Hutchison.
During 1892 Marwood and Perry imported a new brick pressing machine and increased brick production. Mr. Marwood also found time that year to build for himself the first brick house in Enderby. By 1894 the Enderby Brick Yard produced 12,000 bricks per day in season and sold them for about $ 10.00 a thousand. However, in February of that year Frank Marwood died at the age of 34.
It appears that the Enderby Brick Yard was purchased by the partnership of Paul and Baird, who continued to expand and produce fine bricks. In October of 1895 they won first prize in the Vernon fair for one dozen pressed bricks.
The Vernon News reported on December 2, 1897 that Paul and Baird had dissolved their partnership. There followed a large gap in news coverage of the brick yard until a May 1904 Enderby Edenograph news item stated that "A.M. Baird has taken over his brother's interest in the brick yard and is now in full ownership."¹ Audrey Baird of Enderby believes that his father, A.M. Baird, owned the brick yard with his brother Harry.
Andy Baird attempted to combine a plastering and masonry business with the brickmaking operation. In a 1904 Edenograph ad for the brick yard he stated that he also contracted plastering, chimney building, brick and stone masonry.
By December 1904 R. Ronald Gibbs of Kelowna had bought a half interest in the brick yard and became manager. The company then operated under the name of Enderby brick and Tile Company. It seems to have concentrated entirely on the manufacture of those two items.
The Enderby Brick and Tile Co. was not without competition. In 1905 the Okanagan Brick Company was formed by three local men: George Brown, H. Byrnes, and Charles Hiens, manager. They opened a yard on the property of T.J. Poyntz. An indignant letter to the editor of the Edenograph on June 28, 1905 from the Enderby Brick and Tile Co. protested: "...the exhibition of a brick of ours in the office of Messrs. Fisher and Sage, Armstrong, alongside of two samples of the Okanagan Brick Company's. We claim that good samples of our bricks will compare favourably with good samples of anyone else's, but we do not claim that our worst specimens will compare with other people's best and who has ever seen a kiln of brick however well made and burnt without some defective bricks in it? We are sorry the Okanagan brick Co. consider that something more than legitimate advertising is necessary to make their brick go..."²
The Okanagan Brick Company seems not to have made a go of it for long, nor did the Enderby Cement and Brick Works which was in operation in 1913. A 1914 plan to establish a large brickmaking plant on the west side of the tracks opposite the Enderby Brick and Tile Company property seems never to have been realized.
At the time that Mr. Gibbs became a partner, the brick yard was situated along the Shuswap River in Enderby between Regent and Baird Streets. Mr. Gibbs took full ownership of the brick yard in 1909 and continued to operate under the name of the Enderby Brick and Tile Company. He planned to install a brickmaking machine to double the output.
In 1910 the last 700,000 bricks produced in the "Baird Brick Yard" were fired. The following season the operations were moved to ten acres of land purchased from the Stricklands about two miles north of town. This location was later the site of the Malpass Lumber Mill, and still later the Ganzeveld Mill. It was described as valuable clay land, and the bricks produced there were of a "...finer, clearer, brighter colour than even those produced at the old yard."³
A railway spur was put into the new brick yard which lay between the CPR line and the river. Better brickmaking facilities were built. Business was brisk in 1911 and 1912. By May 1912 the Enderby Brick and Tile Company had all the orders it could handle for the coming season. After that year ads for the Enderby Brick and Tile Company no longer appeared in the local paper. Its reputation was established.
Under Mr. Gibb's management the Enderby bricks were used in buildings from Revelstoke to Vancouver. Buildings made of Enderby brick from that era include the Armstrong High School, the Revelstoke Hospital and Molson's Bank in Vernon. In Enderby they included the Drill Hall, the Bell block (now the location of Central Sports and the People's Drug Mart), the Presbyterian Church (now the United Church), and the original A.L. Fortune School (now the brick building at M.V. Beattie School).
By the end of 1914 Mr. Gibbs had added a better kiln, a wirecut brick plant, new engine and boiler. He had placed all drying boards under cover and had plans for a pressed brick plant. The company continued to expand its operations under his direction until the end of the 1920 season.
In 1921 Mr. Gibbs moved to Vancouver and leased the operation to Andy Fulton, who hired a brickmaking expert, William Freeman, as foreman. The company continued to prosper, producing 1,400,000 bricks in 1921 and even more in 1922 despite holding back shipments until freight rates were reduced on August 1st of that summer. However, in the fall of 1923 Mr. Fulton left the business and joined his family who had already moved to the coast.
Salmon Arm businessmen, Mr. P.A. Gorse and Mr. Jamieson, took over the brick yard from Mr. Fulton in the spring of 1924. William Freeman, George Lucas, George Kent and E. A. Robertson contracted to produce the bricks. Mr. Freeman became manager.
The brick yard remained active, producing two sizes of bricks, drain tile, and single or double building tile. Despite diminishing demand during the Depression years, eight to ten men were usually employed. Harvey Stenquist of Enderby and Percy Gorse of Salmon Arm both worked in the brick yard during the years leading up to World War II. They remember the process used during what were to be the last years of the brick yard.
The clay was dug on site and loaded into small carts located on tracks. A horse pulled the cart to the bottom of an inclined structure. From there a steam cable donkey pulled the cart on rails to an elevated platform. The clay was dumped into a mixer, which was a bin with a worm gear that ground up and propelled the clay forward. During this process water was added by Mr. Freeman's son Billy, whose years of experience helped him to gauge the correct quantity of water to add. The mass was then pushed downward to go through a die to shape it into bricks or tiles as desired. A rotating wheel using steel wires as cutters sliced the pressed clay into the required lengths.
The raw bricks were then pushed onto a rolling belt to be lifted off by two men working on either side of the conveyor. The bricks were placed carefully on small flat-decked carts and taken to the drying sheds. In 1935 lines of tracks were laid, running to the drying sheds and kilns. This system to tracks and turntables greatly reduced handling and breakage.
The drying sheds were adjustable and could be tipped to keep the direct rays of the sun from hitting the bricks and drying them too rapidly. There were also many loaded carts, covered for protection from moisture, spread about the yard on small spurs. After several days of air drying the bricks were taken to one of three huge kilns near the CPR tracks.
The bricks were packed lightly in the kiln which was then sealed at each end. Wood fuelled fires were lit in apertures along the sides. Mr. Stenquist estimates that 35 cords of wood could be used in a firing. It took five days or more to "cook" the bricks. For the first two days the temperatures were kept low to let the bricks release any remaining moisture and thus prevent them from cracking later in the higher heat. For the remainder of the firing period the workers fed the fires constantly. So hot did the mass of bricks become that it took a week to ten days for the kilns to cool so that the bricks could be loaded in boxcars or trucks.
A social note the local newspaper of June 23, 1938 mentions that a number of young people from town enjoyed a wiener roast around the kiln fire. But the men stoking the oaring flames could justly claim that they were the ones being roasted.
One local teenager, Gertrude Rands, now Mrs. Ted Peel, rescued a drain tile from its utilitarian destiny. To do this she enlisted the help of Johnny Freeman, the foreman's son. He gave her a freshly cut damp drain tile. Gertrude modelled the clay into a head, and when it was dry when and Johnny slipped the head, protected in a wooden apple box, into a kiln. The box, of course, burned during the firing, causing fire-flashing on the model. But the fired head survived and is still treasured by Mrs. Pell, its deep red clay a reminder of the thriving industry that supplied bricks for so many buildings.
During the later thirties the Squilax store, the Bloom and Sigalet Garage in Lumby, Monk's Garage, the Masonic Temple and Anglican Church in Vernon, and many homes in Salmon Arm, Kamloops, Vernon, Armstrong, Lumby and other Okanagan areas were built with Enderby bricks.
In the spring of 1939 Enderby Brick and Tile prepared for a busy season, but the political storm clouds swirling over Europe were also casting shadows over this small industry. By fall World War II was under way, and William Freeman plus the entire crew joined the armed forces thus suspending the brick yard operations.
Percy Gorse explained the fate of the brick yard: "When my brother and I were discharged from the Air Force we joined our father in the business and tried to get outside interests to give us financial help in order to modernized the plant and try to get things running again, but to no avail. With the permission of nearby farmers we took soil tests on their property and found there was lots of good clay, but it was not to be, and so ended an era."
That era, during which the brickmaking plant was part of the fabric of local life, lasted approximately fifty years. Another fifty years have passed since the last kiln was fired, but the red brick buildings stand strong, and the fine, clear, bright clay lies latent beneath the cultivated fields.
Footnotes
1. Edenograph, May 18, 1904, page 1.
2. Edenograph, June 28, 1905, page 1.
3. Enderby Press and Walker's Weekly, June 22, 1911, page 1.
4. Letter from P.E. Gorse, January 25, 1990.
Dorothy Wanderer
Okanagan Historical Society #55, 1991