Welcome to another historical journey from Unseen St. Louis. Last month, I photographed a number of artifacts at the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, including a stack of old Hydraulic bricks. Those bricks gave me the perfect excuse to tell the story of one of St. Louis’s most important industries — and its surprising connection to a famous poet many people do not realize was born and raised here.
Long before T. S. Eliot became one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, his family was tied to one of the industries that literally shaped St. Louis.
His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was president of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company, the St. Louis firm that transformed brickmaking by replacing hand-pressed brick with stronger, denser, machine-made brick produced on an industrial scale.
From the Eads Bridge to the Anheuser-Busch Brew House, from cobblestone streets now hidden beneath layers of asphalt to buildings across the country, hydraulic brick became a cornerstone of modern St. Louis. By the late nineteenth century, the company was producing hundreds of millions of bricks a year and had become the largest pressed-brick manufacturer in the world.
This is the story of Hydraulic Press Brick: how a new machine changed the way St. Louis built itself, how the Eliot family helped turn brick into one of the city’s defining industries, and how that same family produced a poet who would spend much of his life trying to leave St. Louis behind.
Before Hydraulic: A city of hand-pressed brick
The story begins in Cheltenham, once a small resort area along Manchester Road, straddling the line between The Hill and Dogtown.
Cheltenham sits on deep seams of coal and clay formed by a syncline, a bowl-shaped folding of underground rock layers. Near the surface were clays suited for firebrick, sewer pipe, tile, and terra cotta. Deeper down was the dense red clay that would become the signature brick of St. Louis.
By the 1840s, these deposits had drawn the city’s first brick manufacturers. The Laclede Fire Brick Company was operating by 1844, and over the next several decades, the area became an industrial center of kilns, smokestacks, and clay mines, as well as nearby smelting and steel companies.
By the end of the nineteenth century, more than fifty clay manufacturing companies operated in St. Louis, creating the densest concentration of this industry in the country.
At first, every brick was made by hand. Workers pushed wet clay into wooden forms as hard as they could, sliced off the excess with wire, turned the bricks out by hand, and fired them in kilns. You can still find these bricks in the houses of older neighborhoods like Soulard and Old North, and when you look closely, you notice their irregularity. These bricks contain marks from workers’ fingers, along with small cracks or gaps, uneven edges, and occasionally the marks of animals that walked across drying bricks.
Many brick lovers romanticize these older bricks because of their handmade qualities. But the reality was that making them was slow, exhausting work, and difficult to scale as St. Louis grew.
The 1849 fire made the demand for brick even greater. People grew wary of wooden construction, while stone was harder to quarry and transport. Brick became the practical choice for rebuilding the city, and an invention that made brickmaking faster and more consistent arrived at exactly the right moment.
How hydraulic brick changed modern construction
In 1856, Ohio engineer and inventor Ethan Rogers patented what he called “a new and improved machine for molding and pressing brick by hydraulic pressure.” Rogers was the foreman of the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company in Cleveland, which was managed by Elisha T. Sterling. Looking to expand the company’s manufacturing beyond ironwork, Rogers turned his attention to brickmaking and developed a machine that would change the industry.
Instead of workers forcing clay into wooden molds by hand, Rogers’s machine used steam-powered hydraulic pressure to compress clay into bricks. The result was revolutionary: a stronger, denser product that could be made with far greater precision and at industrial speed.
The first hydraulic brick machine was put into service in Cleveland in 1856. Three years later, that original machine was sold to a manufacturer in Nashville and eventually melted down for ordnance during the Civil War, but by then the idea had already proven itself.
It wasn’t long before the technology reached St. Louis through Elisha’s nephew, Edward Canfield Sterling. After an unsuccessful attempt at running a lumber business, Edward returned to Cleveland and secured a financial interest in Rogers’s hydraulic dry brick press. He acquired a new 33-ton cast-iron machine and moved it to Memphis in 1860, where it produced 8 million bricks in just eleven months.
When the Civil War disrupted operations in Memphis, Sterling looked west. In 1865, he brought another of Rogers’s massive hydraulic presses to St. Louis, leasing a brickyard near Chouteau and Mississippi streets in what is now Lafayette Square. He began producing machine-pressed brick just as the war ended and the city entered a period of rapid rebuilding and expansion.
In 1868, the Hydraulic Press Brick Company was formally incorporated.
At first, many local builders dismissed machine-made brick as inferior to handmade brick. They claimed the drier clay required by the press would fail, and some refused to use it for exterior walls, insisting it belonged only in hidden partitions. There was also fear that the new machine would put people out of work. In fact, in Philadelphia, rioters smashed the city’s first steam-powered brick machine and threw the pieces into the river.
Sterling responded with proof. Government tests showed Hydraulic bricks could withstand roughly 157 tons of crushing pressure, compared to only 65 tons for common handmade bricks. James Buchanan Eads and his engineers tested the bricks for the Eads Bridge and found them superior. Contractors who initially resisted soon found themselves demanding more than Hydraulic could supply, and prices reflected that demand. While hand-pressed bricks generally sold for $15 per 1000, Hydraulic charged $21 per 1000.
That strength came with a tradeoff: the new bricks were considerably heavier. As a result, hod carriers — the laborers who hauled bricks and mortar up ladders on construction sites — demanded higher wages to carry them. To keep sales moving, Sterling personally paid the difference.
Hydraulic’s craftsmanship also showed in the variety of bricks it produced. Face bricks were smooth, durable bricks used for exterior walls. Ornamental bricks were molded into intricate decorative designs (as seen in the advertisement above). Enameled or glazed bricks were coated in colorful vitreous glaze finishes for both strength and shine. These bricks could be found in some of the city’s most recognizable buildings, including Powell Hall, the Chase Hotel, the Missouri Athletic Club, and St. Louis University High School.
As St. Louis expanded, so did Hydraulic. By 1890, the company operated six major yards in the city, including locations at Grand and Chouteau, Cheltenham, the corner of Gravois and Chippewa, the crossing of Kingshighway and the Frisco Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad crossing at Manchester Road. At its peak, it operated eleven yards in the St. Louis area. At the junction of Manchester Avenue and Kingshighway stood the company’s machine shop and Yard No. 2. By 1904, its offices had moved to the 12th floor of the Missouri Trust Building at 705 Olive Street.
Even today, the company’s footprint survives in the name of Hydraulic Avenue, which runs north-south from Bingham to Gravois through Dutchtown and Gravois Park.
The company also expanded far beyond Missouri through subsidiaries in major cities, effectively exporting St. Louis brickmaking across the country. With eleven additional plants located outside the city, places like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Cleveland, and beyond used red bricks made from Cheltenham clay. Even the Chrysler Building would eventually use Hydraulic brick.
By the 1890s, Hydraulic was known as the largest brick company in the world, with eleven brickyards producing more than 200 million bricks annually. When Edward Sterling retired in 1905, he consolidated those operations and handed leadership of that industrial empire to a new president: Henry Ware Eliot.
Though Hydraulic remained a major force well into the 20th century, its fortunes began to decline after the Great Depression in 1929. The company stopped making bricks entirely in 1972, shifting instead to aggregate and other construction materials. It survived in that form into the 2000s before being absorbed by an Indianapolis-based company in 2010. By then, the company that had once dominated St. Louis brickmaking had largely passed into history, but the influence of the people who ran it — and the laborers who made it possible — remained part of the city’s story.
The workers behind the city’s brick empire
Before Hydraulic brick could shape the skyline of St. Louis, its raw materials had to be dug from the ground. Miners worked underground at sites across the city, laboring in near darkness, blasting clay loose with dynamite, breaking it apart by hand, and loading it into mule-drawn carts to haul it to the surface. It was dirty, dangerous, punishing labor, and often poorly paid.
Much of that work fell to immigrant laborers as well as Black workers, the majority of whom were formerly enslaved people or their children. Irish and Italian laborers were often found in the mines, kilns, and as hod carriers hauling brick and mortar on construction sites, while German immigrants were more often represented in the skilled trade of bricklaying.
After the Civil War, and especially as Reconstruction ended, many formerly enslaved Black families moved north along the Mississippi River in search of work and safety. They were fleeing Ku Klux Klan violence, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and the lack of opportunities outside agricultural labor. Many arrived in the rapidly growing city of St. Louis, where expanding industries offered difficult but steady work, particularly in the clay mines and brickyards.
Henry Ware Eliot wrote bluntly about the realities of that workforce. He described the scars many Black laborers still carried from enslavement — welts from overseers’ whips and wounds from bloodhounds used to hunt freedom seekers.
Yet he also viewed the company’s segregated labor structure as a practical advantage. Black workers were largely excluded from white trade unions, which limited collective action and helped management keep wages lower and suppress strikes.
He recalled sitting on the office steps with founder Edward Sterling, both armed with loaded revolvers, after being warned that a group of white brickmakers planned to come to the yard and drive the Black workers off the premises. The racial divisions within the labor force were not incidental; they were part of how companies like Hydraulic maintained control.
That tension became especially clear during the brickmakers’ strike of May 1, 1895, when more than 1,000 workers walked out across brickyards throughout the city. The strike began at the Superior Press Brick Company at Arsenal and Kingshighway and quickly spread. Striking workers marched to Hydraulic at Kingshighway and Manchester, picking up additional workers from other companies along the way.
The Post-Dispatch reported that, because of high demand, workers at Hydraulic were laboring day and night, giving them a strong incentive to join the strike. In total, sixteen companies were affected, and brick manufacturing across the city was shut down.
Ultimately, the labor action led to wage increases for many of the workers — except at Hydraulic, where, despite 300 workers joining the strike, racial divisions helped the company maintain tighter control over labor and avoid the same pay increases seen elsewhere.
The Eliots: From bricks to literature
By the early 20th century, the Hydraulic Press Brick Company had become one of the largest industrial businesses in St. Louis, and company leadership had passed to the Eliot family.
Today, the best-known name in that family is Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot. Long before he became one of the defining literary voices of the twentieth century, his grandfather and father were already prominent figures in St. Louis, helping shape the city through education, civic leadership, and the Hydraulic Press Brick Company.
T. S. Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, arrived in St. Louis in 1834 as a Unitarian minister and quickly became one of the city’s most important civic figures. In 1853, he founded Eliot Seminary, which would later become Washington University in St. Louis, and in 1859, he founded Mary Institute (now MICDS). Though often described as an abolitionist, Eliot opposed slavery but supported gradual emancipation and colonization rather than immediate abolition, and he supported efforts to keep Missouri in the Union during the Civil War. He was also involved in founding what would become the Saint Louis Art Museum.
William’s son, Henry Ware Eliot, took a different path from his father. Rather than following William into the ministry and civic leadership, he entered business. In 1874, T. S. Eliot’s father joined Hydraulic Press Brick as secretary and treasurer, eventually becoming president in 1905 and later chairman of the board. For decades, he managed payroll, debts, clay acquisitions, expansion into other states, and the day-to-day operations of what had become one of the largest brick manufacturers in the country.
Into this world, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 at 2635 Locust Street. He spent the first sixteen years of his life in St. Louis. He attended Smith Academy, Washington University’s former boys’ preparatory school, and later lived with his family at 4446 Westminster Place, a brick house his father built using materials from the company.
T. S. Eliot would spend much of his adult life trying to leave St. Louis behind. He moved east for college, studying at Harvard University, then settled in England. He became a British citizen in 1927 and eventually became one of the defining literary voices of modernism. He’s famous for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, and won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. Today, he is considered one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century.
But although he left St. Louis behind, it never fully left his writing. He reportedly took the name “Prufrock” from the St. Louis furniture company Prufrock-Litton, and the yellow fog in his poetry echoed industrial smoke drifting across the Mississippi River. Years later, he admitted how deeply the city had shaped him, writing, “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done.”
And in T. S. Eliot’s poem Choruses from the Rock, he offered a quiet callback to his family’s industry:
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.
In the vacant places We will build with new bricks Where the bricks are fallen We will build with new stone Where the beams are rotten We will build with new timbers Where the word is unspoken We will build with new speech There is work together A Church for all And a job for each Every man to his work.
Despite being born here, T. S. Eliot is barely visible in St. Louis today, making it easy to forget he lived here at all. His birthplace is gone, replaced by a parking lot. The T. S. Eliot House still stands on Westminster Place as a designated City Landmark, but as a private residence, it passes largely unnoticed. The only real public memorial to him is a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Most people know Eliot as a British poet, and few realize he was born and raised in St. Louis, much less that his father helped build the city through the Hydraulic Press Brick Company.
The connection between the poet and the bricks that built St. Louis has largely been forgotten, but both are part of the same St. Louis story — and both deserve to be remembered.
For more about St. Louis bricks, check out the recap posts (with audio!) from two past Unseen STL History Talks:
Thanks for reading! Be sure to subscribe to Unseen St. Louis for more deep dives into St. Louis history, along with announcements for upcoming history talks, including one later this summer on Hydraulic Press Brick and its Black workforce.
If you liked this article, be sure to share it with your friends. And if you value this kind of independent research and writing, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which makes it possible to keep doing this work — and is deeply appreciated.
Sources:
Aaron Belz Perspective – Do We Care? Do We Dare?, St Louis Magazine, April 10, 2007.
BRICK YARDS ARE NOW IDLE.: ONE THOUSAND MEN QUIT WORK EARLY THIS MORNING, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1, 1895.
Webster Bull, T.S. Eliot “Choruses from the Rock” (A Few Words for Wednesday), Patheos, January 24, 2017.
Frances Dickey, “Hydraulic: The Company and Its Archive,” Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society
I Am The Place That Made Enough Bricks Annually To Encircle The Equator, Missouri Historical Society.
Mike Jones, 1872: Like A Ton Of Bricks (Part 2), Lafayette Square Archives, July 2, 2023.
Chris Kallmyer interview with Michael Allen, Chris Kallmyer Studio (Archive.org link)
Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, “The Clayworking Plants of St. Louis” in the journal Brick, Special Issue on St. Louis, May 1904, p. 235-239.
Chris Naffziger, The Clay Industry in South St. Louis, St. Louis Patina, March 29, 2021.
Drew Quon, Lecture on formerly enslaved Black workers at Hydraulic Brick, National Building Arts Center, February 14, 2026.
Stefene Russell, Bric(k)olage, St. Louis Magazine, August 20, 2010.
Al Stamborski, “Chicagoans may buy 1868 company here,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb, 8, 2000.
Mimi Stiritz, Hydraulic Brick Company: The Early Years, National Building Arts Center, 2004.
Adam Teich, Aidan Smyth, Cecilia Wright, Detric Henderson, and Nkemjika Emenike, WashU’s founder was not an abolitionist: Who was William Greenleaf Eliot? Student Life: The independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis, Nov. 16, 2021.
T.S. Eliot House - City Landmark #59, City of St Louis.
Unseen St. Louis, “Unseen STL History Talks - All About Bricks” (featuring Mitch Goist), Oct. 27, 2023.
Paul Wagman, “History And Color, But No Bricks Or Profit,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 4, 1985.
William Greenleaf Eliot, Wikipedia.
Glynn Young, Finding Eliot in St. Louis, tweetspeak, September 1, 2015.
I ran a T. S. Eliot Symposium in February at the former Wednesday Club building his mother sponsored, also on Westminster. Write up on that forthcoming!
N.B. The scholars have told me Eliot never actually lived at the Westminster house.
I always wondered where the street name Hydraulic came from. What a fascinating story.