Brick Capital, USA

Around 1920, brick manufacturers focused their attention on the depot village of Colon, several miles northeast of Sanford. Abundant deposits of clay and shale, ideal for making durable shale brick, extended under the village, and its location astride rail lines leading to the state's major cities made it a prime shipping point. In 1919 or 1920, Lewis Calvin Isenhour opened a brick plant (later known as the Little Plant) with ten round "beehive" kilns and a capacity of 25,000 bricks, manned by twenty to thirty workers. Isenhour opened a second plant with fifteen more beehive kilns and by the end of the 1920s, the Isenhour complex produced over 20 million bricks per year, many of which went toward the construction of the U.S. Army's Fort Bragg, located near Fayetteville.

In 1925, a group of Goldsboro brick manufacturers held a groundbreaking for another Lee County brick plant, the Borden Brick & Tile Company. Located along the Seaboard line between Sanford and Colon, the facility soon featured nine or ten beehive kilns, a coal elevator, and plants for crushing shale and shaping bricks. Borden's work force numbered between seventy-five and one hundred employees. Meanwhile, at Colon, two other brick plants had joined Isenhour: the Sanford Brick & Tile Company and the Shale Brick Company. Idled by the Depression, the Sanford Brick & Tile Company and the Shale Brick Company did not last long; however, Isenhour and his son Lewis acquired the former in 1930, and in the late 1930s they absorbed the latter. The Isenhours decided to keep the name of the Sanford Brick & Tile Company in order to enhance their local identity.

Local brick manufacturers responded to the phenomenal national expansion in building activity that followed the World War II as well. In 1948, president Isenhour constructed two continuous-firing "tunnel" kilns for a sprawling new facility at Colon known as Plant 1. Three additional plants were constructed in 1951, 1954, and 1956. By the end of the 1950s, Sanford Brick & Tile had installed twelve tunnel kilns with a combined output of over half a million bricks per day, and the work force had grown to nearly four hundred employees. Borden Brick & Tile also installed tunnel kilns, giving it an annual capacity of 48 million bricks by 1966. A third brick manufacturer joined Isenhour and Borden in 1946, when the Lee Brick & Tile Company was established on US I north of Sanford, the second brick manufacturer in the state to install a continuous-firing kiln. In total Lee County's brick plants produced approximately 40 percent of all brick manufactured in the state in the 1950s, and North Carolina in turn produced a sizable percentage of the national total: 10 percent in 1960. In 1959, statistics such as these inspired officials to erect a brick sign on the US 1 that to this day proclaims, "Sanford, N.C., Brick Capital of the U.S.A.”