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The Bay State brick Co.
was organized in 1863 with a capital of seventy-five thousand dollars, which has since been increased to three hundred thousand dollars. The company employs from three to four hundred men, and has an annual capacity of fifty to sixty million brick.
The plant has the latest and most improved machinery for the prosecution of its work.
The Boston office of the company is in the
Smith Building, 15 Court Street.
manufactures annually fifteen million brick.
The business was founded in 1881.
The capital invested is fifty thousand dollars, and some fifty men are employed.
The company makes a specialty of common sewer and paving brick.
The
Boston office is at 17 Otis Street.
Other plants in
Cambridge are those of
N. M. Cofran & Co., Concord Avenue;
Edward A. Foster, near Walden Street;
M. W. Sands, Walden Street.
The first business of the kind in this city was established by
Alexander McDonald in 1856, when he commenced cutting marble for monumental purposes.
Since that time the business has steadily increased, changing somewhat to meet the demands when granite was introduced.
Mr. McDonald invented the
McDonald Stone-Cutting Machine, which is in successful operation in the largest granite works from
Maine to
California.
He was the first to run a quarry entirely by steam-power without the use of horses or oxen.
Granite for many fine buildings has been furnished by the firm.
Among them are the
Worcester Lunatic Asylum and the Durfee High School at
Fall River, also memorial work of every description at other places.
The
Cambridge soldiers' monument, and the soldiers' monument for the national government in
Salisbury, N. C., erected in 1872,—the largest obelisk at that time ever manufactured in the
United States, measuring four feet square and thirty-one feet in length,—were made here.
In 1887
Frank R. McDonald was taken into the firm, and since that time the business has been confined principally to fine monumental work from all kinds of marble and granite.
It has been found more profitable to do the principal cutting and heavy work at the quarries, though at the
Cambridge works from twenty to thirty men are constantly employed to do the carving and finishing.
Some of the finest monuments, headstones, tablets, and carved work have been made here, and erected in
Mount Auburn and other prominent