Red Brick Streets: The Tale of Thurber

Many of us are familiar with the red bricks of Camp Bowie and the Stockyards in Fort Worth, but where were those bricks made? The answer is Thurber, Texas, which is a ghost town today but was once the largest town between Panther City and El Paso. Thurber was a coal mining town, and around the year 1920 it boasted approximately 10,000 residents. Of those residents, a great many were immigrants, with Italian and Polish immigrants being the largest of the nearly twenty groups represented.

The town had a brick plant, where the bricks for the Galveston Seawall and Congress Avenue in Austin were also made, but very little remains of the plant today. In its heyday, Thurber had a company-owned opera house, library, and saloon, as well as a mercantile store, which is now the Smokestack Restaurant, where we dined today. Almost as rapidly as it had risen, the town of Thurber virtually disappeared in the 1930s due to the growth of the petroleum industry and labor disputes.   

Here are the bricks in front of Saint Barbara's Catholic Church in Thurber. Saint Barbara, incidentally, is the patron saint of miners.

This is a fragment of the brick plant remains displayed at the W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas. 

Here is a photo of medicine from the mercantile store. Notice that the product names are written in both English and Polish. 

For a bit of musical entertainment, here's everyone's Uncle Willie playing "Dark as a Dungeon."