In 1837, when the tiny settlement of Bourbonnais Grove was still part of Will County, pioneer settler Noel LeVasseur decided it was time to build a dwelling more modern and comfortable than the log cabin where he had lived and conducted his fur trading business since 1832.

He turned to fellow pioneer resident Thomas Durham, a brick mason by trade, to build his new house, which would be the first brick building in what is now Kankakee County. Just a year earlier, Durham had erected the first brick building in the raw frontier town of Chicago — a warehouse for former fur trader Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard.

The house Durham built for LeVasseur, using bricks made on site, had a two-story central section, with single-story wings on either side. It was located on the site of what would become St. Viator College (now Olivet Nazarene University). The building was demolished in a campus expansion in the late 1880s.

Kankakee historian Burt Burroughs described the “on-site” brickmaking process that was used for a house built several years later near Bourbonnais.

“A small pen of rails was built, into which a number of cattle were turned,” he wrote.

“Water was poured on the ground, and the constant tramping of the cattle soon converted the soil into mud of a consistency to be readily moulded into bricks. After the bricks had been thoroughly sun-dried, they were arranged in the form of a kiln and burned.”

Not long after Kankakee County was formed in 1853, bricks were available commercially to meet the building needs of the county’s fast-growing towns. J.V. Miller, who had established a brickmaking business at Aroma, near the junction of the Kankakee and Iroquois rivers, advertised in 1854 that he had 100,000 bricks available for sale.

Early brick buildings in downtown Kankakee included the 1857 “Empire Block,” a three-story building on the southeast corner of Court Street and East Avenue built by druggist Frederick Swannell, and the 1858 “Exchange Block,” another three-story structure that housed a hotel, the townsite development company’s offices and the Minchrod & Epstein Clothing Store.

The Exchange Block occupied a prime piece of real estate at Station Street and East Avenue, directly across from the IC Railroad station.

While demand for brick to build residences, stores and office buildings was primarily urban, the needs of farmers generated demand for a different product, drainage tile. By the late 1870s, most of the county’s fertile and well-drained land was under cultivation.

To expand production, farmers saw need to “dry out” large areas of fertile but soggy ground. Often referred to as “wet prairie,” the soil of such low-lying areas was saturated, and typically was under a shallow layer of water for as much as half of each year.

Drainage ditches were dug across such areas and connected to creeks or rivers, but were only partly effective. To supplement the ditches, a farmer could lay down a field of drainage tile. Individual tiles were hollow ceramic cylinders, usually 4-to-5 inches in diameter, which were laid end-to-end in the soggy ground.

The porous material allowed water to seep through the tile wall, then flow through the “pipe” formed by the tile cylinders, and empty into a drainage ditch or waterway.

Demand for drainage tile led to the formation, in the early 1880s, of three “tile and brick” manufacturing companies in the eastern half of the county. The first to begin operation, in 1881, was the Grant Park Tile and Brick Company, founded by Alonzo Curtis.

The year 1884 saw the Kankakee Tile and Brick Company, formed by Daniel C. Taylor, H. E. Taylor, Thomas Kerr and Andrew Kerr, and the St. Anne Brick and Tile Company, established by Adam Danforth, and a man named Currie.

A third company established in 1884 at Momence did not manufacture tile — it specialized in brickmaking. The Tiffany Pressed Brick Company was incorporated by Joel Tiffany, James Van Inwagen and Solomon Snow. Tiffany had invented a machine to manufacture pressed brick, a denser and more durable product than common brick.

In the early 1890s, the company began producing a unique decorative type of brick with a smooth, hard porcelain face and was renamed Tiffany Enameled Brick Company.

Available in white or a variety of colors, Tiffany enameled brick was widely used for retail buildings, hospitals and other applications. Its most familiar application was in the 1920s, when the White Castle hamburger chain adopted Tiffany brick for use in its earliest restaurants (later, White Castle used enameled steel panels instead of brick). The Tiffany company became a victim of the Great Depression, closing in the early 1940s.

Two of the county’s tile and brick companies survived disasters. The Kankakee company’s plant, located at Wildwood Avenue and Chestnut Street on the city’s north side, was destroyed by a fast-moving fire on Dec. 8, 1894.

“The alarm was turned in at 5:30 p.m.,” reported the weekly Kankakee County Democrat in its Dec. 14 edition, “and in less than an hour there was nothing but a smoldering mass of burning embers left of the large plant that had marked the spot and given employment to many families for years past.”

The plant was rebuilt the following year; it was later relocated to a site between Kankakee and Aroma Park, and operated there well into the 20th century.

In 1912, the thriving Alonzo Curtis Brick Company at Grant Park was devastated by a powerful tornado that tore through the plant and the town. Three employees of that plant were injured.

Damage to the facility was compounded when wooden debris left by the tornado caught fire from the red-hot brick kilns. The plant was rebuilt, but ironically was destroyed by fire in 1916. It was not rebuilt after the second disaster.

The last of the county’s brick and tile manufacturing companies to begin operation was the Manteno Brick and Tile Company, which was organized in 1906. During excavation of the plant’s clay pit, a natural spring was hit; continuous pumping was needed to permit work to continue.

When the company ceased operation in 1928, pumping stopped, and the clay pit gradually filled with water, eventually forming 38-acre Lake Manteno.

St. Anne Brick and Tile Company continued manufacturing clay drainage tile until 1994, although it had diversified some 20 years earlier — in 1972 — into production of plastic drainage pipe. Plastic pipe would eventually dominate the drainage market, making clay tile obsolete.

Although most of Kankakee’s downtown churches built in the mid-to-late 1800s were constructed using local limestone, one congregation chose a different material for its building in 1879. What was that church and what material was used?

Answer: First Presbyterian Church chose red brick when erecting its current building on the northwest corner of Court Street and Indiana Avenue. It replaced the congregation’s original wooden structure, which dated to 1855. The church’s 2,000-pound bronze bell, cast in 1879, is still in use.