Ferris Brick Company

The Old Brickyard golf course in Ferris, opened in 2000, was laid out over the old clay pits of the Ferris brickworks, which the course says were the Ferris Brick Company's. By a local newspaper's account that company was formed in 1923 from the merger of six earlier brick firms, in the town known locally as the brick capital of the nation. The Handbook of Texas lists clays valuable for brickmaking among Ellis County's mineral resources, and before the First World War brick manufacturers used the mineral clays in the soils around the town to give Ferris a lasting industry. A Texas Historical Commission marker dates the town's brickmaking to 1895, and by 1914 Ferris had some fifty businesses, six of them brick plants, along with a broom factory and a weekly newspaper.

Around four in the morning on 21 April 1910 the Globe Pressed Brick Company at Ferris, which the Dallas Morning News called one of the largest plants in Texas, burned from a fire that started in its engine room. The loss was put at $30,000 to $40,000, including about $8,000 worth of partly burned brick, and the plant carried no insurance; its stockholders voted that morning to rebuild. Some of the output went north to Dallas. In and around the 1930s the Ferris Brick Company supplied many of the city's new buildings, and bricks stamped Ferris have been found in a Dallas house by the architect Charles Dilbeck. Four brick plants were still operating in Ferris in the 1950s, and by the same newspaper's account the last brickyard closed in 1978. The golf course, designed by John Ponko, uses the old quarry pits.