The Butler Brickworks

Michael Butler came out of Limerick to New York in 1866, learned the bricklayer's trade as a helper, and founded his own brick company in Austin in 1873. What he was really looking for was clay, and he found it here, at a siding the Texas and New Orleans Railroad had reached in 1871, five miles east of Elgin. The works grew onto a thousand acres and the settlement around it took the family name. Almost three million Butler bricks went into the 1888 Texas State Capitol, along with the University of Texas Old Main Building, four fifths of the early brick buildings on the Austin campus, and the facade of the United States Embassy in Mexico City. The Capitol is a granite building, so the claim worth making is the accurate one: Butler supplied the brick inside it, not the stone anybody sees. Butler became a company town in the full sense, with a company store and brick houses for workers who farmed on the side. It never had a post office. Around a hundred and seven people lived there in the 1930s and a hundred and fifty by the late 1940s. The firm bought Austin Brick in 1912 and its chief competitor, Elgin Standard Brick, in 1965. Elgin's own industry began separately in 1884, when Thomas O'Conner, an Irish born brick contractor who had been buying from Butler in Austin, found better clay at Elgin and started making his own. By 1940 the town had two large plants and a third arrived in the 1950s, which is where Elgin got the habit of calling itself the brick capital of the Southwest. That one is a self adopted epithet. The town's other nickname is not: the Legislature proclaimed Elgin the sausage capital of Texas in 1995.