Fletcher Steele (right) speaks at Pine Hall Brick's 100th anniversary event Friday, along with his son Walt Steele (left).
A Pine Hall Brick Company product.
Flake Steele speaks with visitors at Friday's 100th anniversary celebration.
A Pine Hall Brick Company truck.
A blast breaks ground on the Pine Hall Brick Fairmount facility in 2003.
Fletcher Steele (right) speaks at Pine Hall Brick's 100th anniversary event Friday, along with his son Walt Steele (left).
A Pine Hall Brick Company product.
Flake Steele speaks with visitors at Friday's 100th anniversary celebration.
A Pine Hall Brick Company truck.
A blast breaks ground on the Pine Hall Brick Fairmount facility in 2003.
On Friday, Pine Hall Brick Company celebrated its 100th anniversary, also marking 20 years in Gordon County.
To celebrate two decades locally, the company held employee luncheon at its Fairmount plant, 318 Industrial Road, joining a simulcast ceremony from the company’s Madison, North Carolina manufacturing plant that included speeches and the unsealing of a time capsule, buried in 1999.
Pine Hall Brick established its Fairmount facility in February 2002 to make use of the area's shale deposits, following the approval of Gordon County's Board of Commissioners. Presently, the plant occupies 900 acres, and has been in operation since fall of 2003.
“Having a plant closer to the large markets in the southeast as well as the huge paver market in Florida fulfills a major strategic goal for us," said then President Fletcher Steele.
The 275,000-square-foot (Plant 6) was opened to serve the Atlanta and Nashville markets, as well as parts of Alabama. The plant's capacity doubled in 2005.
Steele’s son Walt is now the company's president, taking that position in 2021, while Fletcher currently serves as executive chairman.
“Since 2003, the hardworking men and women at our Georgia Facility have been instrumental in our success as a company,” Walt Steele said. “The team in Gordon County helped lead the charge out of the Great Recession and Pine Hall Brick wouldn’t be where we are today celebrating our 100th Anniversary without their invaluable contributions.”
In 1889 J.C. Steele, a brick manufacturer in Statesville, North Carolina, received his first patent for brickmaking, founding J.C. Steele & Sons, an extrusion and brick-making equipment company.
Later, in 1922, Steele’s son Flake Steele purchased the dormant Consolidated Brick Company in Pine Hall, along with several hundred acres of Triassic shale, founding Pine Hall Brick company on Aug. 7. In 1937, Flake’s son, Flake Steele Jr., joined the company, serving as company president after his father’s death in 1952 and served until 1989.
During World War II, the company suspended brick operations and began focusing on clay pipe manufacturing for war effort infrastructure. After later reviving its brick making operations, volume eventually became so great that the company expanded its reach to open the Fairmount plant and became the largest supplier of clay pavers in the United States.
According to company information, launching the Fairmount operation first involved extensive testing of the local shale that determined it was ideal for brick manufacturing. The Georgia product produces slightly different colors from the company’s North Carolina brick and pavers. Fairmount quickly became important to Pine Hall Brick expansion and its supply chain.
“I am thankful for those that I have the privilege to work alongside because together, we are building a business as durable as the products we make and sell,” said Walt Steele. “And I am thankful to those who have entrusted us to provide brick for their homes, their office buildings, factories and hospitals, along with pavers for their patios, walkways and driveways.”
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