Industry & Invention

Atlanta, GA

Laid out between 1910 and 1940 around the Capital City Country Club, Historic Brookhaven was Georgia's first planned golf-club community, a leafy enclave of grand homes on Atlanta's north side. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it reflects the early-twentieth-century vogue for suburbs designed around recreation and greenery.

Brooklet, GA

Brooklet took shape in the late 1890s along the new Savannah & Statesboro Railroad, on land owned by A. J. Lee and once known as Nellwood. An early resident, Dr. H. K. Thayer, won the town its name from the brook that ran through it. By its 1907 incorporation, Brooklet had a school, bank, telephone company, churches, and a large lumber mill, growing into a thriving community in eastern Bulloch County.

New York, NY

Built in 1860–61 beside the Fulton Ferry landing, this red-brick Italianate building housed the offices of one of New York's earliest large-scale transit companies. By the century's end its dozen streetcar lines fanned out from the ferry terminal, carrying tens of millions of riders a year through a booming Brooklyn. After a later life as a factory, the building was converted to residences in the 1970s and folded into the Fulton Ferry Historic District.

New York, NY

Opened on May 25, 1950, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel runs beneath New York Harbor to link Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn, and at 9,170 feet was celebrated as the longest continuous underwater vehicular tunnel in North America. Built in the era of Robert Moses's sweeping public-works program, it threaded automobile traffic under the harbor rather than over it, preserving the view from Battery Park. This plaza marks its Manhattan portal.

Meadow, TX

The town of Meadow shifted to this spot to meet the railroad in 1917, and by 1922 a blacksmith shop stood on the site. Alabama-born, World War I veteran brothers Leslie and Herschel Brooks brought water-drilling know-how to the area, and through marriage and partnership the Brooks Blacksmith Shop became a three-generation family enterprise. Serving farms and ranches until it closed in 1996, the shop was also a gathering place at the heart of the community.

Austin, TX

Designed by C. H. Page and Son and completed in 1938 for businessman Herman Brown, the Brown Building rose as a sleek Art Moderne office tower in downtown Austin, later gaining ninth and tenth floors that matched its original lines. Its tenants read like a roster of mid-century Texas power: the construction giant Brown & Root, offices for Congressman and future president Lyndon B. Johnson, and the broadcasting company tied to Johnson and future governor John Connally. Listed on the National Register in 1994, it was converted to lofts in the early 2000s.

Jefferson, TX

This Jefferson landmark once housed the town's newspaper — the memorably named 'Jimplecute' — along with other papers and the Chesterfield Social Club. It survives as a reminder of the busy civic life of a riverport that ranked among the most important towns in nineteenth-century Texas.

Wylie, TX

Built in 1889, the Folk Victorian Brown Cottage was the first Wylie home of businessman William Thomas Brown and his wife Martha, who moved to the new railroad town in the mid-1880s to help build it up. An early alderman and developer of the Brown & Burns Addition, Brown ran a mercantile store serving the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad and area farmers. In 1903 the "little white house" was moved to make way for a grander family home, and it remains one of Wylie's most intact original residences.

Brownwood, TX

Determined in 1901 to replace an outdated 1881 lockup, Brown County built a jail that deliberately looked like an ancient fortress—complete with rusticated stone, a castellated roofline, corner turrets, and Romanesque arches. English stonemasons dressed the local sandstone, while the interior steelwork came from the Youngblood brothers, who went on to found the Southern Steel Company, a major maker of prison equipment. After serving until 1981, the castle-like building found new life as a county museum.

Jefferson, TX

This ornate, two-story stick-style Victorian was built in 1888 by lumberman George Washington Brown, who later moved into the oil and gas business. In 1928 Harrison County farmer John Griffin Bender — later Jefferson's road commissioner — bought and renovated it, keeping it in his family until 1972, its original hardware, stained glass, and gingerbread trim intact.

City of Rochester, NY

Brown's Race takes its name from the millrace—a channel that diverted water from the Genesee River—that powered Rochester's earliest mills near the High Falls. In the early 19th century this water-driven district turned Rochester into the "Flour City," America's flour-milling capital, as grain from western New York farms was ground here and shipped east along the Erie Canal. The race and its surrounding plaza preserve the industrial heart that made the young city boom.

Brownfield, TX

In the 1920s, when much of rural Texas still lacked electricity, newly incorporated Brownfield resolved to modernize. After voters first rejected a bond, determined residents formed a light and ice company—a common pairing, since early power plants often ran the town's ice works—and won approval for a municipal plant in 1921. By 1923 Brownfield had electric power, and the plant served the community until 2003 before being kept on as a distribution control center.

Case Township, MI

This plaque marks a Michigan Centennial Farm — land held and worked by the same family for at least a hundred years, with the Browning place established in 1914. The state's Centennial Farm program honors the endurance of family agriculture through generations of changing markets and machinery. Such farms anchored the rural communities of northern Michigan.

Victoria, TX

John Milton Brownson, a Confederate veteran raised in nearby DeWitt County, opened a grocery in Victoria in 1866 and the next year founded the town's first bank in a modest frame building on Main Street. Through a string of partnerships and reorganizations it grew into the First National Bank of Victoria in 1889, with Brownson as its first president, and carried on under later names as a pillar of the local economy for generations.

Brownwood, TX

Built in 1914 beside the Santa Fe depot, the Brownwood Harvey House was one of the celebrated restaurants Fred Harvey established along the railroad to give travelers dependable food and lodging. Popular from opening day, it closed in 1937 but reopened to serve soldiers when Camp Bowie was activated in World War II, shutting for good in 1945 as passenger rail declined. Its red-tile roof and decorative brackets reflect the Spanish Mission Revival style the Santa Fe favored across the Southwest.

Wills Point, TX

German-born Oscar Pabst opened an apothecary in Wills Point in 1879, along the busy Dallas–Shreveport road. After fire damaged his store in 1888, the business passed to his son-in-law B.W. Bruce, who joined J.H. Human and other investors to form the Bruce and Human Drug Company in 1898. From a prime downtown building it has served the town ever since, sheltering doctors' offices, the telephone exchange, and even the posting of local election returns.

Brownsville, TX

In 1925 Louis and Inez Brulay hired prominent Brownsville architect E. Guy Holliday to design this Spanish-Mediterranean home in the city's first suburb, complete with curved archways, white textured stucco, and a red terracotta roof. Louis was the son of George Brulay, a French immigrant whose Brulay Sugar Plantation outside the city was among the region's early agricultural ventures.

Bruni, TX

The town of Bruni grew up around Antonio Mateo Bruni, an orphaned Italian immigrant from Emilia-Romagna who came to Texas in the 1870s and built a mercantile and ranching fortune along the border. A railroad station on one of his ranches around 1881 drew a commissary, a school, and eventually a surveyed townsite. Oil strikes in the 1920s and commercial uranium mining from the 1970s gave the settlement successive economic booms.

Columbus, TX

Charles Brunson left Westphalia, Germany, in 1845 as part of the great mid-century German migration to Texas, and by about 1867 had settled in Columbus, where his saloon prospered. In 1891 he erected this Victorian commercial building, adding an adjoining store in 1896; it poured drinks until around 1919 and then took on other uses. Aside from a lowered canopy and altered windows, it still wears its original Victorian dress.

Brunswick, GA

During World War II, the J. A. Jones Construction Company's Brunswick shipyard employed more than 16,000 men and women who built 99 steel 'Liberty Ships' between 1942 and 1944. Turning out roughly four of the 447-foot cargo and troop carriers each month, the workers once built seven in a single December as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. Their ships helped keep the Allied supply lines open.

Bryan, TX

Chartered in 1909 by Bryan's mayor and its merchants, the Bryan & College Interurban Railway opened in 1910 to link the town with the growing Texas A&M campus a few miles away. Trolleys and gasoline rail cars ran ten daily round trips, spawning subdivisions and even an amusement spot called Dellwood Park along the route. Beset by the rise of the automobile, the line slipped into receivership in 1922 and made its last run in 1929—but along its path Bryan and College Station grew until they merged into one.

Freeport, TX

Early in the 20th century, mining engineers found rich sulphur deposits at Bryan Mound, spurring the founding of the Texas Freeport Sulphur Co. in 1912. Their success drove the growth of the Freeport townsite itself. The operation was among Texas's earliest to use the Frasch process—superheated water pumped underground to melt and lift the sulphur—producing five million tons before it closed in 1935.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth builder and civic leader William J. Bryce raised this five-sided commercial building in 1910 to house his construction company. Bryce erected many of the city's downtown structures and later served as mayor from 1927 to 1933. Its irregular plan and Classical Revival detailing make it a graceful adaptation of a monumental style to everyday business use.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 2014

Founded in 1882 in the ironmaking town of Catasauqua, the Bryden Horse Shoe Works grew into one of the largest horseshoe plants in the world. Using George Bryden's patented process, it turned out shoes of such quality that demand reached across the globe—including thousands supplied to the British War Department during and after the Boer War. As the age of horsepower gave way to machines, the firm became the Phoenix Manufacturing Co. in 1928 and shifted to commercial forging.

Bryn Athyn, PA · est. 1947

Bryn Athyn Cathedral is the architectural centerpiece of the Swedenborgian church community, its buildings modeled on 14th-century Gothic and 12th-century Romanesque forms. Endowed by industrialist John Pitcairn in the early 20th century, it was raised in a deliberately medieval fashion by cooperative craft guilds of masons, carpenters, and metalworkers who shaped the stone and glass by hand on site. The result is a rare American revival of guild craftsmanship in an age of the assembly line.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2001

From 1921 to 1938, the campus of Bryn Mawr College hosted a bold experiment: a summer liberal arts school for women who spent their days in factories and workshops. Led by educator Hilda Worthington Smith, it welcomed more than 1,700 students of varied races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, offering wage-earning women the kind of humanities education usually reserved for the privileged. Many graduates went on to become leaders in their unions, communities, and public life.

Bryson, TX

Henry E. Bryson, a Civil War veteran turned farmer and stockman, raised the first log cabin here in 1878, and a post office followed in 1882 to serve a growing cotton- and grain-growing district. The Rock Island Railroad arrived in 1902, but it was oil that made the town's name: the first well came in 1925, and from a gasoline plant in the 1920s to a refinery that ran until 1954, Bryson billed itself as Jack County's petroleum capital.

Burnet, TX

When a private dam project on the Colorado River went bankrupt in 1932, State Senator Alvin Wirtz turned to Washington, winning the backing of Congressman J.P. Buchanan — and the dam's name — to finish it. The 1934 Texas Legislature created the Lower Colorado River Authority to manage the river, and in the depths of the Depression the project put some 1,800 locals to work at 40 cents an hour. Completed in 1937, the dam raised Lake Buchanan behind it, drowning old Bluffton and forcing the relocation of graves, but bringing recreation, business, and steady power to the Hill Country.

Licking Township, PA

In the 1840s, the hills of Clarion County rang with the work of the charcoal iron industry, and the cold blast furnace built here in 1844 — named for James Buchanan, the Pennsylvanian who would soon become the nation's fifteenth president — was part of that booming trade. Furnaces like this one smelted local iron ore using heat drawn from vast quantities of charcoal, which meant they devoured the surrounding forests at a staggering rate. By 1858 the nearby timber was exhausted and the furnace fell silent, a common fate that turned many a prosperous ironworks into a quiet ruin in little more than a decade.

Cuero, TX

When Otto Buchel arrived in the brand-new town of Cuero in 1872, he opened a mercantile store—and, owning the only safe in town, soon found neighbors entrusting him with their valuables. Within a year he turned that trust into a private bank, and Buchel's Bank went on to weather financial panics, hurricanes, and droughts, steadying the young town's commerce. Incorporated as a national bank in 1907, it still serves South Texas as Buchel Bank and Trust.

Albany, TX

In 1900 the Texas Central Railway pushed a line northwest from Albany across the cattle ranch of Rose Ella 'Ella' Conrad, and she and her brother John A. 'Bud' Matthews quickly built cattle pens and a loading chute at the spot named for him. Surrounding ranchers soon shipped their herds — as many as 105,000 head a year — from this switch to the Fort Worth markets. Even after the railroad quit in 1967, ranchers kept loading cattle here onto trucks.

Clear Lake, IA

The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, hosted Buddy Holly's final concert before the young rock-and-roll pioneer boarded a small plane that crashed nearby in the early hours of February 3, 1959. Holly was just 21; the disaster, which also killed Ritchie Valens and J.P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson, became mourned as 'the Day the Music Died.'

Stafford, TX

Planned in 1840 to move sugar and cotton from the plantation country of the young Republic of Texas, this venture was chartered in 1841 and, after early failure, revived by San Jacinto hero Gen. Sidney Sherman with backing from leading Texans including Rice University benefactor William Marsh Rice. The first locomotive, the 'General Sherman,' arrived in 1852, and by 1853 the line ran twenty miles from Harrisburg to Stafford's Point, celebrated with a barbecue-jubilee. By 1860 the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado stretched eighty miles inland, becoming the first operating railroad in Texas.

Buffalo, NY

Before automated buoys and GPS, lightships were floating lighthouses—anchored at dangerous points where building a tower was impossible, their lanterns guiding vessels through treacherous waters. Light Vessel 82 marked the approach to Buffalo on Lake Erie until the catastrophic Great Lakes Storm of November 9–10, 1913, often called the "White Hurricane." That ferocious blow, with hurricane-force winds and blinding snow, claimed more than 250 lives and sank roughly a dozen ships, LV-82 and her entire crew among them.

Texline, TX

Buffalo Springs' permanent water made it a famed hunting ground teeming with buffalo and mustangs, and a cow camp before 1878. From 1882 it served as headquarters of the legendary XIT Ranch—once the largest fenced ranch in the world at three million acres—land the state of Texas traded to a syndicate in exchange for building its granite Capitol in Austin.

Winder, GA

This steam locomotive, No. 208, was built in 1930 and spent its working life on the Gainesville Midland Railroad before the Seaboard Air Line Railroad presented it to Winder and Barrow County in 1959. Retired as one of the last steam engines still running in the region, it was set here as a permanent tribute to the machines that once moved the nation's freight and passengers.

Jefferson, GA

Built in 1907 and last run on the Gainesville Midland Railroad, this steam locomotive was among the final steam-powered engines to operate in the area. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad gave it to the City of Jefferson in 1959 as a lasting exhibit honoring the service such engines rendered the country.

Washington, DC · est. 1950

Around 1828, under architect Charles Bulfinch, two small gate houses were raised at the west entrance to the United States Capitol grounds. The structure marked here stood until 1874; its mate now stands near 15th Street and Constitution Avenue.

Washington, DC · est. 1950

Around 1828, architect Charles Bulfinch—then completing the United States Capitol—oversaw construction of a pair of small gate houses guarding the western entrance to the Capitol grounds. The structure marked here stood until 1874; its companion survives today near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue.

Goliad, TX

When the railroad reached Goliad in 1889, cheap brick, stone, and lumber fueled a building boom around the courthouse square. On the side of the Stout-Pettus block, painted sometime between 1894 and 1900, a traveling sign crew left an enormous Bull Durham tobacco advertisement — an eight-by-twelve-foot bull and the boast that the brand "has no equal." Hidden for decades behind an interior wall, the mural was rediscovered in 2012 and restored, a rare survivor of the era's hand-painted "wall dog" advertising.

Lincoln County, NV

Bullionville sprang up in 1870 when John H. Ely and W. H. Raymond moved a five-stamp mill here from Hiko, drawn by the water that nearby Pioche lacked. Because ore could be milled beside a reliable water supply, most of Pioche's mills soon relocated here, and by 1875 the town had five mills, 500 residents, and eastern Nevada's first iron foundry. When a Pioche waterworks was built that same year, the mills drifted back, and even a tailings-reworking plant in 1880 could not halt the town's decline.

Gladewater, TX

Built around the turn of the twentieth century, this Gladewater house blends Colonial Revival dormers and gable ends with Craftsman touches like tapered box supports on brick piers. Sawmill owner and road builder William E. Bumpus and his wife Catherine bought the property in 1927, and it stayed in the family until 1987. It survives as a well-preserved local landmark of early East Texas domestic architecture.

Pottsville, PA · est. 1996

In the anthracite country around Pottsville, Burd Patterson helped unlock the hard coal that would fuel American industry, devising in 1835 a slope method for mining below the water table where earlier operators had been stopped cold. A few years later his Pottsville Furnace became the first to successfully smelt iron using anthracite, proving that Pennsylvania's stubborn hard coal could power a modern iron industry. His mansion, begun around 1830, led the procession of grand homes that came to line Mahantongo Street.

City of Troy, NY

In the booming iron city of Troy, New York, Henry Burden's works harnessed water power to mass-produce horseshoes at an astonishing rate — machinery so productive it is said to have helped shoe the Union cavalry during the Civil War. The lower works forged these famous horseshoes for the army in wartime and for civilian markets after. Troy's ironworks helped make the upper Hudson Valley a powerhouse of 19th-century American industry.

Burkburnett, TX

Burkburnett got its name at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt after a 1905 wolf hunt with rancher Burk Burnett, and the townsite was laid out in 1907 along a new railroad. But it was oil that made it famous: after a 2,200-barrel gusher came in on the Fowler farm in July 1918, some 200 wells sprouted in the townsite within three months and the population leapt from 1,500 to 15,000 in a single year. The frenzy inspired the 1940 film "Boom Town," cementing the town's "Boomtown USA" legend.

Eastland, TX

Joe Burkett — who with his father and brother discovered and propagated the original Burkett pecan tree in 1900 — was also a schoolteacher, county official, and state legislator. He and his wife Fannye built this home in 1919–1920 on a working farm lot with outbuildings. New owners reworked it in the 1930s in the popular period-revival taste, and its stucco walls, low hipped tile roof, and porte cochere give it a Spanish Colonial Revival look.

Putnam, TX

In 1900, near Putnam, J. H. Burkett selected and propagated a superior nut from a native pecan tree — the beginning of the Burkett pecan, a variety that would help turn Texas's wild groves into a commercial industry. Burkett, who lived from 1861 to 1945, became a leading champion of pecan growing across the state. The tree honored here stands as the source of that enduring cultivar.

Morristown, NJ

In the early twentieth century, as Morristown grew from a Revolutionary-era county seat into a prosperous New Jersey town, prominent families often gave land for public use. In 1911 the Frederick J. Burnham family donated this ground to the community as a public park, and eight decades later, in 1991, the town rededicated it to mark the original gift. The marker reflects the Progressive-era conviction that open, green space was essential to civic life in a growing town.

Bullard, TX

From 1913 to 1919 a 400-member religious commune worked the former Douglas Plantation near Bullard, founded by the Chicago-born Metropolitan Church Association, popularly called the Burning Bush Society. The colony aimed at self-sufficiency, running its own school, sawmill, power plant, water system, and sewage works. Crushed by debt, it disbanded soon after World War I ended.

Burton, TX

Built in 1937 by Edward Whitener and Quintus Zwernemann, the Burton Cafe has anchored this small town's main street for generations, serving as both an eatery and a social gathering place — and for a time a liquor store. Its simple false-front stepped parapet is sheathed in metal stamped to imitate brick.

Burton, TX

A group of local farmers organized the Burton Farmers Gin Association in December 1913 and raised this two-story metal-clad gin building the next year. Its machinery ran on steam until an oil engine took over in 1925, and as the last gin in town after 1948 it kept ginning cotton until 1974. Today it survives as one of the few complete gin-and-mill complexes left in the United States.

McKinney, TX

Completed in 1910 for business and civic leaders Newton A. and Laura Wallace Burton, this one-story house was designed by architect J. E. Cooper in an eclectic blend of bungalow, classical revival, and American foursquare styles. A wraparound porch on Doric columns, shingled hip dormers, exposed rafter ends, and stained-glass transoms give it its distinctive character. It stands as a fine example of early-20th-century Texas residential architecture.

Burton, TX

Chartered in 1906, the Burton State Bank served this small Washington County farming town under its founding president, C. W. Homeyer. When banks failed across the country during the Great Depression, Burton State closed for just three days, was examined and found solvent, and reopened—operating on this site until 1965.

Dallas, TX

Beer baron Adolphus Busch built this striking commercial block in 1913 as a retail and office complement to his adjacent Adolphus Hotel, then a symbol of Dallas's rising ambitions. Designed by a St. Louis firm with a local partner, its soaring vertical lines, Gothic pinnacles, and fine terra-cotta detail announced the city's arrival as a commercial capital. The Kirby Investment Company acquired the building in 1919, lending it the double name it carries today.

Urbana, IL

Constructed in 1870, this was one of Urbana's first brick buildings and became one of its most popular opera houses. A 1915 remodeling turned it into the Princess Theatre, and in 1934 an Art Deco facade gave it a modern face—layers that trace the evolution of downtown entertainment from Victorian opera hall to movie palace. The building charts a half-century of American small-city cultural life.

Granbury, TX

Built in 1891, this Granbury commercial building housed a succession of the town's leading merchants and civic figures. It opened as F. C. Bush's dry goods store — Bush served as city tax collector and secretary — then became the Morgan Drug Store under Eugene H. Morgan, who later practiced as a physician. For seventy-two years it remained tied to drugstores, including that of William H. Cherry, a Granbury mayor and bank director.

Humboldt County, NV

In 1873 Frank Button and his uncle Isaac drove cattle into the fertile valleys of northern and eastern Humboldt County to start ranching under their famous Double Square brand. Across some 4,000 square miles of range they raised thousands of fine horses. Though the original ranch sold in 1884, Frank Button stayed in the country, serving as Button Point's postmaster and as chairman of the Humboldt County commissioners.

Titusville, PA · est. 2009

In the frantic decades after the Drake Well launched the oil age just up the road, the industry's greatest bottleneck was moving crude from Pennsylvania's fields to the sea. Byron D. Benson answered it in 1878 by founding the Tidewater Pipe Company and laying an ambitious long-distance pipeline that carried oil directly toward coastal refineries, breaking the era's tight grip on rail-based shipment. His larger six-inch line proved that petroleum could be pushed economically across great distances, a template the whole industry would follow.

Milam, TX

Charles Alexander Nethery, Sr. opened a general store near this site in 1880, and after fire destroyed the original in 1915 the family rebuilt the metal-clad frame building that stands today. Passed down through generations of the Nethery family, it is the oldest continually operated business in Sabine County.

Yorktown, TX

The Eckhardt family's mercantile store dates to 1848, just after Yorktown's founding, when wagons hauled goods inland from the Gulf port of Indianola and gold and silver were smuggled to San Antonio hidden beneath potatoes to buy supplies. This sturdy building — iron shutters, an elevator, and walls twenty-five inches thick — went up in 1876 to house the thriving business. During the Civil War the Eckhardt wife kept the store running while her husband and two sons served the Confederacy.