OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
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OLD
BRICK
YARD

OLD
BRICK
YARD

The story of Pangburn Bricks as told to Marjorie Proell
by Lester Pangburn grandson of David Pangburn

"They sold them faster than they could make'em," said Lester Pangburn of his grandfather's brick making operation. The business was started a few miles north north of Sauk Centre in 1864, and for years was the main source of bricks for all of Sauk Centre and Melrose.

The founder of the business, David Pangburn, took a claim in Sauk Centre Township in 1861 and brought his family to the farm in 1864. He found the clay along Sauk River, which his farm bordered just right for brickmaking and went into the business within the year.

During the next 60 years the Pangburns were to turnout no less than 300,000 bricks a year.

Farm boys and single men from town were hired during the summer months to work in the brick yard. They earned, if Lester remembers correctly, $1 a day plus their room and board.

The men had a bunkhouse of their own, equipped with a hand organ and a player piano for entertainment in the evenings. For some years Lester and his family lived in the brickyard house, with his father running the family farm while his mother helped cook for the crew and Lester worked alongside the men.

Clay for the bricks was dug by hand; and hauled with dump carts and horses to the brickyard alongside the clay pits. Then it was shoveled into the brickmaking machine -- a big hopper with an auger run by steam to force the bricks out the front.

The clay would come out of the machine three bricks wide, with men at the front cutting them to the right length as the slab was pushed out. As the bricks rolled out, Lester said, the cutters would also stamp ""David Pangburn, Sauk Centre, Minn" on the bricks. "If they weren't lazy they'd stamp a lot of them he said, "otherwise just every once in a while."

Next the bricks were put on three-foot lathes and hauled by wheelbarrow to the drying sheds. The covered sheds held 50 rows of bricks on lathes, each row 75 feet long there they dried for three weeks.

About three times a year, Lester said, the men would fire a batch of 100,000 bricks. Bricks which had dried for three weeks would be stacked in a square about 25 feet high and maybe two or three times the size of a house.

With the bricks in place fires were built underneath -- they burned day and night for 21 days. "That was the hard work," Lester said, recalling that the men would stuff whole trees in at each end to keep the bricks at the right temperature.

After they were properly fired the bricks were left to cool for about two weeks before the men began to open the kiln. One would climb onto the pile and throw bricks to a man below, who was loading them onto wagons. There was a time when the bricks were hauled to Sauk Centre by raft, Lester recalled. Pangburn built a big barge with a paddlewheel to tow the bricks to town, but that didn't work too well so he got a big launch to do the pulling. The bricks would then be unloaded onto wagons in the area of what is now Sinclair Lewis Park.

The old wooden scow that the bricks were towed in was 25 by 12 feet and several feet deep. "On Sundays the crew would push it out in the lake and fish from it," Lester said, but it was finally scrapped when the Pangburns found it more feasible to haul the bricks with a wagon and team.

A dollar a thousand was what they got for hauling the bricks to Sauk Centre, from where they went by rail to Melrose. "Nearly all the buildings in Sauk Centre and Melrose are constructed from (the bricks)," reported an old edition of the "History of Stearns County." Lester agreed that they were very popular for building: we never had any brick lying around the brick yard.

About three times a year, Lester said, the men would fire a batch of 100,000 bricks. Bricks which had dried for three weeks would be stacked in a square about 25 feet high and maybe two or three times the size of a house. The old Ford garage and the apartment building on Oak Street were built of Pangburn brick, as well as many other houses and business places in town. Other buildings, like the Armory and the house next to the Dairy Queen, used Pangburn brick for the inside layers and ordered brick from elsewhere for the outside.

And when he built on his own farm, David Pangburn used brick: the entire set of buildings on what is now the Ira Quistorff farm north of Sauk Centre is of locally-produced brick.

The bricks sold for $10 a thousand, Lester said, or about a penny apiece. They came in shades of red and gray because of the clay from which they were made varied in quality. The clay pits along Sauk Lake held dark clay, a blue clay and a sandy day mixture that produced gray bricks less resistant to the weather.

The bricks varied in quality because of the clay, but they also varied because of the firing. Because of the huge kilns the outside bricks did not get hot enough and had to be used for rough work, The bricks right around the fire, on the other hand, would get so hot that some would melt and have to be thrown out.

During the summer months the brickmaker's farm was run by his son, George. His son, in turn, helped out in the brickyard; by the time he was I2 Lester was cutting and stamping bricks.

David later sold the farm to Ed Pangburn, who phased out the opera non in about 1918. The lami1y name, however. will grace the walls of innumerable buildings in the area for years to come.

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