Thomas Stearns Eliot is the quintessential voice of twentieth-century literary despair, the high-minded modernist poet who gave us “The Waste Land.” But his ethereal, transatlantic literary life was not funded by old aristocratic money. It was paid for by the terrifying, steam-powered compression of St. Louis dirt. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, eventually ran the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, an industrial behemoth that took the ancient, artisanal process of brickmaking and replaced it with a machine that simply crushed the earth into submission.

For most of human history, building a brick wall meant someone had to slap wet mud into a wooden mold and wait for it to dry. It was slow, labor-intensive work. But in the mid-nineteenth century, a mechanical engineer named W. Rodgers at the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company in Cleveland had a brutalist realization: if you hit dry clay hard enough, you don’t need the water.

Rodgers took a “walking beam” steam engine—the kind of massive power plant normally used to drive early lake vessels—and repurposed it. He rigged the ship engine to drive a hydraulic press, forcing dry, screened clay into iron molds under ungodly pressure.

A St. Louis businessman named Edward Canfield Sterling saw the potential, bought into the patent rights, and brought the technology to Missouri. In 1868, he incorporated the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. To actually run the terrifying new machinery, he brought in Willis N. Graves, a man who had operated a primitive version of the press down in Memphis.

Graves became the plant superintendent and essentially the mechanical architect of the company’s explosive growth. By 1872, the steam-powered hydraulic presses were churning out an astonishing 9,000 bricks an hour.

But traditional builders wanted nothing to do with them. A machine-made, “dry-pressed” brick felt deeply unnatural. Masons assumed that because the clay wasn’t wet-mixed, the bricks would be brittle and crack under the sheer weight of a serious building.

The debate ended because of James Buchanan Eads.

Eads was a self-taught engineer in the middle of trying to span the Mississippi River with the world’s first major steel arch bridge. He couldn’t afford brittle materials. He needed to know exactly what kind of stress the masonry could take for the bridge’s approaches and the massive accompanying railroad tunnel. Eads and his assistant, Henry Flad, didn’t trust anyone’s sales pitch. They took traditional, artisanal hand-pressed bricks and put them into a testing machine. The hand-made bricks shattered under 65 tons of pressure.

Then they put in one of Willis Graves’ new machine-made bricks. The hydraulic-pressed block held until it hit 157 tons—more than double the strength of its artisanal competitors.

Eads bought them. The argument was over. Once the Eads Bridge testing proved the machine-made bricks were effectively indestructible, the company exploded.

Under the eventual leadership of Henry Ware Eliot (T.S. Eliot’s father), the company grew into a closed-loop empire. Because the massive steam presses were prone to breaking down under the intense strain, the company simply built its own machine shops to manufacture and repair the parts on-site. By 1890, their St. Louis operations alone spanned over 200 acres and employed 500 workers. They became the largest manufacturer of pressed bricks on the planet, producing hundreds of millions of their signature “Hy-Tex” bricks annually.

They built the Anheuser-Busch Brew House. They built the sprawling neighborhoods of Lafayette Square and Soulard. They built the miles of uniform, dense red brick that defined the St. Louis skyline.

And they generated an immense fortune. The money that poured out of Willis Graves’ steam-powered hydraulic presses is exactly what paid for young Thomas Stearns Eliot to attend the Smith Academy, and then Harvard, and then Oxford, and then the Sorbonne. The twentieth century’s defining poem of psychological fragmentation and literary alienation was entirely funded by the mechanical perfection of midwestern masonry.