Stanley Brick Part One - When The Trees are all Gone

Some of the things that send me off researching local history are ephemeral artifacts.  Crumbling bits of paper, ghost signs on the sides of buildings and so forth.  But other times I am intrigued by more solid objects, the kind of thing you could stub your toe on. Recently when walking by a bit of construction work in town I picked up this interesting brick.

This reminded me that while I knew that the neighboring community of Stanley, Wisconsin had once had a brickyard, I had never gotten around to researching it.  So it was off to the various fonts of knowledge, old newspapers, the Wonders of the Internet, and a visit both delightful and informative to the Stanley Area Historical Society.  Here's the tale.

Communities developed in Western Wisconsin along predictable routes.  The early commodity par excellence was the virgin white pine growing in the river valleys. From the earliest days up through the 1880s enormous quantities were cut, floated down stream and sent elsewhere.  But eventually the stands of timber were getting thinner.  With the advent of railways it became possible to look elsewhere at the same moment that it became necessary.

Stanley was established in 1881 when a rail line struck out east of Chippewa Falls.  It was from the first a mill town with smaller ventures being replaced in 1891 by a gigantic mill put up by the Northwestern Lumber Company.  

Stanley became a company town.  On the plus side this gave it early industry that its sleepy, never to develop neighbors did not have. On the other hand, as the new timber stands started to thin out it became clear that a major economic disruption lay ahead.

I can't quite puzzle out the degree to which new enterprises in Stanley were sponsored by the Northwestern Lumber Company or simply by farsighted entrepreneurs.  There certainly seem to be links.  The leather tannery for instance used the mountains of oak bark from the mill.  And then there is the brick yard.  Was it a response to the pending crash in the timber industry?

The first evidence of a brick yard in Stanley is a brief mention from 1903 that a certain "N. Patrick's" new brick yard at Stanley had just finished a good season and expected to add new machinery.  This might have been an unrelated small time enterprise just using the same clay deposits, or perhaps a forerunner of the later yard.


In September 1904 the Northwestern Lumber company put into operation a brick yard that presumably had been constructed over the summer.  Making bricks was generally seasonal work with fall being when most of the product was shipped.  It was a successful venture, turning out 50,000 bricks a day in its early years and getting many contracts to supply major projects.

Business got even better when in 1906 a fire destroyed much of Stanley.  Rebuilding in brick proceeded apace.  

Some of the company's business strikes me as being a bit "in house".  Certainly their new company store, said to have used one million bricks in its construction, qualifies.  Other major projects of the "teens" seem to have been independent ventures.  There were factories built by the Stanley Dependable Baggage Company and The Stanley Toy Works.  

Business was good, but there was a rough patch ahead.  The sawmill closed in 1920 after cutting an estimated 850 million board feet of lumber over its existence.  There may have been a ripple effect, I found mention of the brick yard closing for a while in 1922 due to inability to get the coal needed to run the kilns.  30 men were put out of work, no doubt joining a much larger pool of unemployed workers.

But the brick yard was back in operation in 1923, under new management and with a new name, The Stanley Pressed Red Brick Company.   Production actually increased, in 1930 they were making 84,000 bricks a day with the help of automated equipment.   Until in that year fire destroyed the plant.

But they rebuilt and kept in production through the 30's and into the 1940's.  By this time mechanization made production much more efficient with a machine that could make 10,000 bricks per hour and kilns that could bake 350,000 at a time.  In this era the bricks probably looked like this specimen in the Stanley museum, clean lines and a very simple "S" logo.

Another fire in 1941 destroyed the kilns and put an end to the enterprise.  At that point in time the nation was gathering its resources for greater efforts and it was just a matter of time before both the labor and the coal needed to run such a yard would be in short supply.

Stanley is a tidy little Wisconsin town.  The people are pleasant and hard working.  But to some extent it is still looking for the economic solution to the demise of the Northwestern Lumber Company.  A town established to process lumber is fated to struggle a bit when the trees are all gone.  Some of the solutions such as a big ethanol plant and a newly constructed prison do provide jobs, but Stanley still has a down town that feels a little too big for its current circumstances.  Much of it is constructed of nice red bricks.  Next time we'll take a brief look at a few examples.