Let’s go to the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Here we see a beautiful new brick building under construction. Where do you suppose those bricks came from? Would you believe, they came from a plant in rural Kansas?
Mike Kaiser told me about Cloud Ceramics and Kansas Brick and Tile, two remarkable brick companies located in Kansas. They serve as the source for the bricks at Duke University and many other places across the nation.
Cloud Ceramics in Concordia opened its plant way back in 1947. In 1944, a Concordia businessman named Charles Cook had learned of some outcroppings of clay in a road ditch southeast of town. He did further testing with the state geological survey and found there was a large deposit of Dakota fire clay that was suitable for the manufacturing of quality buff colored building brick. He organized a business to manufacture those bricks, and Cloud Ceramics was born. It was named for Cloud County, the location of the plant.
