In Their Footsteps: Cape Cod History - The West Barnstable Brick Company

    

The remains of the West Barnstable Brick Company

    Sandy Neck in West Barnstable is a hugely popular and important barrier beach and ecosystem on Cape Cod. It is 3,800 acres of pristine beauty frequented by countless thousands of locals and visitors alike year round. The north side is the well known beach with the south side being just as important as it is home to West Barnstable’s Great Marsh which extends all the way down to Route 6A. It is here, close to the Old King's Highway, where huge blue clay deposits were plentiful. For this reason the southern area of Great Marsh would become home to several aspiring businesses which took advantage of said clay. The most famous of which was the legendary West Barnstable Brick Company. This is its story.

The history of the West Barnstable Brick Company dates back to 1876. It was in February of 1876 that Levi Goodspeed purchased twenty acres of land along the Great Marsh. The land was part of the estate of Henry Fish. Goodspeed’s purchase was bisected by the railroad track, and just over a mile from the West Barnstable railroad depot. This prime real estate, sitting atop large clay deposits, was to be used for a new brick-making business.

The West Barnstable Brick Company(Whelden Library)

Levi Goodspeed was a well respected man on Cape Cod at the time. In the decades leading up to the creation of West Barnstable Brick Goodspeed had been a Selectman, member of the House of Representatives, and finally Sheriff of Barnstable County.

Goodspeed brought aboard Benjamin and Charles Crocker to form the management of the West Barnstable Brick Company. Ads for their bricks first began appearing in the local newspapers in July 1878.

The company started small, inundating the local newspapers with those advertisements about their product. Slowly they gained a foothold, even being contracted to supply the bricks for a new jail in Barnstable in December 1878. Its first decade saw the fledgling company struggling to make inroads on Cape Cod. The growing pains of the company were only exacerbated with the sudden death of Levi Goodspeed in November 1879. It appeared as though the West Barnstable Brick Company might be destined to fail.

That changed when the company was bought in 1888 by Abel Makepeace the Cape’s resident ‘cranberry king.’ He added more machinery and more workers, many from Portugal and Finland, allowing the production levels to increase.

West Barnstable bricks were used to rebuild the Cape Cod Exchange building in Harwich, the new town offices in West Barnstable, the new Training School in Hyannis, as well as Our Lady of Hope church. The actual physical bricks were of the highest quality due to the arduous process of creating them. It included breaking up the clay and removing pebbles and other debris from it before shaping the bricks and pouring them into perfectly level molds.

Working at the West Barnstable Brick Company(Whelden Library)

The entire factory was essentially self-sustaining. The clay was collected on the property while the finished bricks were shipped out via the railroad tracks that ran through the property. The only thing that needed to be shipped in was the wood for the kiln used to dry the bricks.

Under the ownership of Makepeace the West Barnstable Brick Company became one of the giants of Cape Cod business. By the 1920’s it was reported that the factory could produce more than 100,000 bricks per day and more than thirty million per year. They were widely popular not only on Cape Cod but throughout the state of Massachusetts and even further.

In October 1925 the business would change hands after nearly forty years when it was purchased by Thomas Arden. He enlarged the factory as well as adding electric lights and a telephone. The company would receive another boost when the one and only automobile king Henry Ford paid a visit as he was interested in the brick making process. On October 14, 1926 Ford stopped by the factory. He wanted to buy a pair of antique engines however Arden gave them to him as a gift despite his objections. Ford would set things square by sending a brand new tractor to Arden a short time later.

The decaying facade of the West Barnstable Brick Factory in 2022.

However as high as the company was riding its demise had actually been set in motion. Unhappy with the fact that brick sizes were not uniform President Herbert Hoover created a universal size for the creation of bricks in 1928. The problem with this was that West Barnstable Brick was an eighth of an inch too large and so new equipment needed to be bought. This meant that the company needed to raise prices to cover costs.

This was only the beginning of the trouble. The October 1929 Stock Market Crash ushered in the Great Depression. This immediately slowed down the need for new buildings. Higher prices to cover costs combined with lower demand for the product forced West Barnstable Brick to cease operations in the fall of 1930.

All was not lost though. Arden, the directors, and stockholders were all meeting and trying to figure out how to get the business up and running again. The venerable brick company remained closed throughout 1931. In September 1931 it appeared as though a new day was dawning. All of the surplus West Barnstable bricks had been sold, and new orders were coming in. Arden and his staff cleaned and oiled the machinery, inspected the boilers, and prepped the clay pits to resume production.

Despite battling bankruptcy plans were in place for the West Barnstable Brick Company to rise from the ashes. By 1932 it had been over fifty years that the rich blue clay had been collected to make millions of high quality bricks. Arden wanted to know just how much clay, and therefore how many years, West Barnstable Brick Company had remaining in its current location. At some point during 1932 a test hole was drilled. This determined that there was roughly fifty years worth of clay remaining. This should have put Arden at ease. Unfortunately though the test hole struck water. This created an artesian well that flooded the clay pits.

The flooded clay pits were the death knell for the company. West Barnstable Brick Company did not immediately close though. Attempts were made to figure out a way to keep going. The remainder of 1932 and into 1933 were a holding pattern. However the Great Depression did not relent. West Barnstable Brick was no more.

In the spring of 1933 West Barnstable Brick Company was sold at auction to the First National Bank of Yarmouth. In the years after the factory was stripped with parts sold off to other Cape Cod businesses while the remaining brick load would be used up. Today all the remains is part of the broken down facade of the building located a few hundred yards off of Route 6A, not far from Our Lady of Hope.

Nature has reclaimed the area where the West Barnstable Brick Company once stood.

It took more than thirty years for a new business to open on the former West Barnstable Brick property. Florence Ungerman opened The Wind-Ship Shop in July 1967 on Route 6A. The area of the property north of the railroad tracks however remained untouched. Over the nearly ninety years since the brick factory closed down nature has been reclaiming what was not removed.

Today the Orenda Wildlife Trust owns the former West Barnstable Brick Company property. It is a part of conservation land. The factory remains are overgrown and highly difficult to get to. The artesian well created a pond in addition to flooding the clay pits. There are nature trails leading behind the Orenda property but a trip to the brick factory remains in not advised.

For more than half a century the West Barnstable Brick Company was truly a giant among Cape Cod businesses. It bridged the gap from man power to steam power to electric power. Its legacy can still be felt today as authentic bricks created by the company are collector’s items and many of the buildings which used the bricks still stand.

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In My Footsteps: Sundays at Nana's

    It’s a funny thing how you can still miss a person tremendously even if you had spent as much time as you possibly could with them. It’s incredible the mark someone can leave on you and your life that you can have thousands of unique memories and moments with them, a literal infinite field of flowers, and yet they still leave you thinking it was not enough. I still have so many vivid memories of my Nana, even twelve years after her death because I was around her so much.

    She was a saint of a woman. All 5-feet of Portuguese and English blood who had been forced to raise four kids on her own after a cruel twist took the life of her husband at the young age of forty-three. It had to have been rough being both mother and father to kids between the ages of eight and sixteen. She did it though, all while also being the bread winner of the family. There was no stay at home parenting, no day care, no babysitting. My Nana became tough and unflappable because life gave her no other option.

    Despite everyone knowing that the family’s success or failure fell squarely on her shoulders she never lost her cool or became overwhelmed by the pressure. If she did feel any of those things she kept them hidden away from prying eyes. Being raised as a child during the Great Depression must have made persevering through life’s struggles as instinctual a trait as breathing. Crying about the hand one was dealt did not change the hand.

    My Nana had to make all of the tough choices when it came to parenting. She did not have a tag team partner to bounce ideas off of. By the time she was forty-three she had lost her husband and her mother leaving very little in the way of immediate family for emotional support. She was good cop and bad cop in the name of raising well adjusted kids. She had to console grieving children who had lost their father, all the while doing her own grieving of her husband and mother in private.

    These challenges of being a child during the Great Depression, college-aged during World War II, and a widowed single-mother in her forties, all shaped my Nana into the person I got to know starting in her fifties. She was fifty-three when I was born. By that point her youngest child was now twenty. Although I’d love to say that my being born allowed her to step back and let her guard down a little the truth is that it was just a coincidence. She had done her job of raising her kids and now it was time to take a breath.

    I don’t have any concrete memories of my Nana until about the age of five. There are however countless photos of things before they left an imprint on my young mind. Some photos might have her head cut out by her own hand, but they all show that she was a constant presence in my life from Day One.

    I never knew the woman named Doris. I never knew the woman lovingly referred to as ‘Ma.’ I only knew Nana. She was the person with the roaring infectious laughter that everybody who came into contact with her tried to bring to the surface. Her laugh made us laugh until tears streamed down all of our faces. It was as much a tradition as turkey on Thanksgiving and lights on the Christmas tree. Nana was the straight man in the venerable nut house that was Boxberry Lane during family gatherings.

    Despite her home being ground zero for all types of gatherings throughout childhood it is Sunday that always stood out for me. In some ways Sunday is still Nana Day in my mind. Those days of visiting her began with being picked up at home, many times by Nana herself. In the early days it was a black Ford Escort (that I took my first driving lessons in), later on it was a red Dodge Dynasty.

    Most Sunday’s consisted of watching television, Three Stooges and WWF All-American Wrestling stand out. If it was warm there was ample time in the backyard either playing Wiffle ball before the neighbors put up a fence in their backyard, or lying in the hammock. If it was cold or rainy we’d be inside. We’d play board games like Chutes and Ladders or going through the old family albums and getting a kick out of the different hair and clothing styles. I can still hear the crinkling sounds the protective plastic made with each turn of those old albums.

    The biggest question was always what was for dinner. During the summer we’d have as many cookouts on Nana’s old red-topped charcoal grill. However Nana could make a lot of dishes. A few of her favorites to share with us were American Chop Suey, Inside-Out Ravioli, New England boiled dinner (ham or corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, carrots), and the classic franks, beans, and brown bread. If she wasn’t feeling like cooking it was pizza from Giardino’s or Taki’s, or a buffet from China Inn.

    Nana was the one who loved her birds (especially Goldfinches), loved her crossword puzzles, and loved her grandkids. That was why if of one Nana’s four kids gave some good-natured ribbing about her being some sort of strict disciplinarian when they were younger we grandkids would just shake our heads in disbelief. That was not our Nana, hell I don’t think that could have been Ma, or even Doris. She was someone who always saw the good in everyone and everything.

    Nana was always the one who seemed truly proud of you for whatever you had done. No matter how small or insignificant it might have been her pride was evident. She was always the one who was genuinely happy to see you even as her life grew painful and her light grew dimmer. As a child and a teenager these Sundays with Nana were written in ink on the schedule of my life. An obligation not a choice, though that does not mean they were any less enjoyable. It just means that as I became a young man in my twenties with my own life and own means of transportation I made it my choice to continue the visits because I wanted to.

    I can sit here now and recall literally hundreds and hundreds of Sundays with Nana. From ones that happened before my memory held on to them to the last one in November 2009 each and every one of them had special moments which, like grains of sand, fill the pristine beach that was my Nana’s life.

    I was blessed to have my Nana in my life until I was thirty-two. This allowed me the ability to see her not only as my loving grandmother but also later on to be able to speak and learn from her as an adult. It allowed me to appreciate the person behind my Nana so much more. It gave me the opportunity to do things like trace her family tree back hundreds of years, or to write a children’s book based around her and her cat Mittens.

    Part of me held on to the belief that as long as I had living grandparents I was still a child. Therefore I was a child until I turned forty-three. Still, as much as I’d love to have one more Sunday with my Nana it gives me peace to know that I had as many as I possibly could and likely more than most people have with their grandparents. I miss those days and can picture all of it so clearly. I miss the old phonograph in the den with the Edison record that we always wanted to play. I miss the cigarette smoke damaged painting above the fireplace. I miss the eclectic collection of glass bottles that lined the mantle. I miss sun tea and Horse’s Necks. I miss climbing up to the attic on a ladder that seemed to be one step from collapse. I miss the rose bush that swallowed a fence, or the giant puddle that formed in the street after it rained.

    Yes I miss all of what made Sundays at Nana’s so special and fun. However there is one thing that above all else I wish I had the opportunity to relive one more time. When we would be driven home after dinner on Sundays Nana would stand in the front door and wave to us as the car drove away. I remember watching her wave and fade from sight as we pulled away. She never closed the door until long after we had vanished, like she wanted to see us for as long as she could as much as we wanted to see her. Even near the end when it was too painful to see me off at the door I could picture her sitting in her favorite chair and waving as she heard my car leave, even if she knew I couldn't see it.

    I find that ending of a typical Sunday, the vision of Nana waving to us slowly growing smaller until she faded away, being a perfect metaphor for her final years. She never closed the door she simply faded away until we could not see her anymore. But if I close my eyes and think hard enough I can see her again, I can hear her again, and despite being gone for twelve years the fact that she remains such a powerful and important part of my life I believe is the greatest compliment I could pay her.

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