On a recent trip to Malvern, the county seat of Hot Spring County, I drove past the huge Acme Brick plant in the nearby community of Perla. It is a sprawling expanse of buildings, gigantic kilns, and storage facilities-and it has made Malvern the “Brick Capital of the World.”
Acme was not the first brick manufacturer located at Malvern. The large deposits of excellent natural clays in the region had been known for years, at first being used for manufacturing pottery. Benton, the county seat of neighboring Saline County, had a crockery industry since antebellum times.
O.C. Atchison, a Benton pottery maker, moved to Perla in 1887 and opened a pottery factory, but he soon switched to making bricks. Atchison bricks were used in the construction of the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs. Most of the early brick production in the Malvern area involved both fire bricks, made to line fireplaces and steam boilers, and face bricks used to veneer buildings.
The Clark Pressed Brick Co. of Malvern was another early brick factory. It was sold to Arkansas Brick and Tile Co. of Little Rock, and in 1926 it was gobbled up in turn by the rapidly expanding Acme Co.
A.B. Cook, a Texan who was manager of the Wisconsin and Arkansas Lumber Co. in Malvern, acquired the Malvern Brick and Tile Co. around 1920.
The company made bricks for the next half-century before Cook’s daughter, Verna Cook Garvan, sold the factory to Acme in the 1970s.
Acme Pressed Brick Co. was chartered in 1891 in Illinois, but the business was located near Weatherford, Texas. Not long after World War I, Walter R. Bennett, Acme’s youthful president, sent a team to investigate the clay deposits in Hot Spring County. Buying 120 acres at Perla in 1919, Bennett developed a large brick factory. Trial production began in 1921.
Charles L. Sewell, who was an original employee at the Acme plant, recalled in retirement that “the Perla plant was intended to be a combination fire brick and face brick plant. The first kiln to be burned off was a kiln of smooth face brick. It turned out to be so good as to color and quality that for a while the production of any fire brick was passed up.”
Acme management experimented extensively with clays to produce a wide variety of brick colors. Among the popular early colors were Sunset, Sungold, Honeysuckle, and a line of gray bricks known as the Mission blend.
Acme bricks were sold primarily in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the southwest. One of the largest orders came from the Air Force to build Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport.
Acme and all the brick producers in Hot Spring County suffered during the Great Depression. Charles Sewell recalled that “none of us realized the completeness of this depression until the beginning of 1932. Acme went along month after month, thinking things were going to pick up.” Acme sales in 1932 amounted to 24 million bricks, down from 165 million in 1928.
Acme, like all the brick plants, cut wages. For some time Acme had paid a top wage of 35 cents per hour, but it was cut to 22½ cents as the depression worsened. Charles Sewell remembered the painful layoffs: “This was a dismal time. It soon reached the place where there were only three persons in the plant. One watched at night;the other two came out and watched during the day and cut weeds.”
The myriad of recovery programs started by Roosevelt’s New Deal helped boost construction, and brick sales picked up steadily. The advent of World War II in 1941 ushered in a whole new era of expansion for Acme. German prisoners of war were usedto keep the plants running when labor shortages threatened production. Two large tunnel kilns were built during the war, and Charles Sewell recalled that “during the next 15 years, these two kilns were never down except for minor repairs.”
In recent decades Acme invested heavily in its Malvern area plants. In 1967 it opened the fully automated Perla East Gate Plant, and in 1980 the original plant in Malvern was replaced with the new Ouachita Plant.
By the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, Acme was America’s largest brick company. Acme shipped more than one billion bricks for the first time in 2001. To commemorate the importance of its brick plants to the local economy, in 1981 Malvern began a yearly celebration known as Brickfest, which continues today.
On August 1, 2000, Acme was purchased by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. In addition to its three plants in the Malvern area, Acme has brick plants in Clarksville, Fort Smith, and Jonesboro.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Pulaski County. Email him at Arktopia.[email protected].
Editorial, Pages 78 on 10/13/2013