Ferris, Texas: The City That Bricked the World
Texas
In eighteen seventy-four the Houston and Texas Central Railway surveyed a new depot town on land donated by the McKnight family in what straddles Dallas and Ellis Counties. They named the stop for Judge Justus W. Ferris of Waxahachie, a county civic leader.
Settlers arrived immediately to work the Blackland Prairie soil, and by eighteen ninety-two Ferris had three hundred and fifty residents and some twenty businesses. What made Ferris famous, though, was clay. The local soil turned out to be ideal for making brick, and by nineteen fourteen six brick plants operated there, and locals called Ferris the brick capital of the nation.
The town still calls itself the city that bricked the world. Its sesquicentennial in twenty twenty-four marked a hundred and fifty years of that story.
