Earlier this month, the Triangle Brick Company team welcomed one of the masonry industry’s most recognizable voices to our Wadesboro, North Carolina plant: Ashton Fairchild, known to her 220,000+ Instagram followers as That Masonry Girl (@thatmasonrygirl).
A two-time National Masonry Champion and the Masonry Promotion & Outreach Coordinator for the North Carolina Masonry Contractors Association (NCMCA), Ashton has built one of the largest platforms in the trade by showing her followers exactly what a career in masonry looks like on real jobsites, in real time. This time, she traded the jobsite for the production floor to see where the brick she sees every day actually comes from, straight from the source, at scale.
Few people do more to put a face on the modern masonry trade than Ashton. Through @thatmasonrygirl, she gives a fast-growing, highly engaged audience of masons, apprentices, contractors, and industry professionals an honest, high-energy look at life in the field — and it happens to be the same audience we build brick for every single day.
That kind of visibility matters. Every reel, jobsite update, and behind-the-scenes look Ashton shares helps a new generation see masonry as the skilled, respected, in-demand career it is. We’re proud of the platform she’s built to promote our industry, and we were glad to give her and her team an all-access look behind the curtain at Wadesboro.
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As one of the leading US brick manufacturers, Triangle Brick built its Wadesboro plant with a capacity of 100 million bricks per year, later adding a second on-site packaging line to keep pace with demand. It’s one of Triangle Brick’s brick manufacturing plants across North Carolina and Texas — a network that together produces more than 600 million bricks annually and processes 26 tons of raw material every hour.
Ashton captured the visit in a reel for her followers, walking them through the mining, forming, and firing process before summing it up in one line:
“When I say they have brick making down to a science, I truly mean that.”
— Ashton Fairchild, That Masonry Girl (@thatmasonrygirl)
You can watch her full recap of the tour on Instagram. Here’s a look at a few of the stops on Ashton’s tour from start to finish! Want to book your own brick plant site tour? Keep scrolling to learn more.
Every Triangle Brick Company brick for sale starts as raw clay and shale, mined directly on our own property before it’s crushed, blended, and ground down to a precise, workable consistency. It’s a detail that surprises a lot of first-time visitors; even Ashton called it out and pointed out that the raw material is exactly what drives a brick’s final color. We’re not just manufacturing clay brick for sale, we’re mining the material ourselves right here in NC.
It’s this complete control of the process that lets us control color and quality from the ground up. Not to mention, with ownership of the supply chain from start to finish, our team’s productivity keeps project timelines in check across the country, unlike imported construction materials impacted by global conditions and tariffs. You can walk through the full breakdown on our mining page.
From there, Ashton watched raw clay become recognizable brick in real time. Prepared material is extruded into an 18-foot clay ribbon, faced with texture and color, then cut and set onto kiln cars by industrial robots before heading into a computer-controlled tunnel kiln, where temperatures climb to nearly 1,900°F to permanently fire, harden, and color every brick.
The setting machines were what really caught everyone’s attention — the precise pressure it takes to lift and load raw brick onto kiln cars without crushing a single one. It’s one of the most automated, technology-driven stretches of the entire process — exactly the kind of large-scale US manufacturing that’s hard to picture until you’ve stood in front of it.
Ashton called Wadesboro “the home of the half stacks” in her recap — and she’s not wrong. Once fired and cooled, bricks are blended for color consistency and packaged using our proprietary Half-Pack™ Technology: pre-blended, strapped, and built for safer, faster handling on the jobsite. It’s a detail masonry experts like Ashton appreciate immediately — she uses them both on the job and in competition — because it’s engineered around the exact work she does every day.
It’s one thing to talk about manufacturing 600 million bricks a year. But, it’s another to watch it happen. For the full step-by-step breakdown of how raw clay becomes the brick stacks you see on your jobsite, visit our Brick Manufacturing Process page.
A tour like this doesn’t happen without the right team on the ground. A big thank-you to Houston Holland, Territory Manager, and Nic Starnes, Territory Sales Representative, plus all of our on-site Wadesboro Triangle Brick team — for hosting Ashton and her team and giving them a firsthand look at what #BrickByTBC means, from the mines to the kiln to the jobsite. Their knowledge of this plant and their pride in it are exactly what we hope every visitor walks away feeling.
Interested in seeing large-scale clay brick manufacturing for yourself? Our brick experts love giving masons, architects, builders, distributors, and industry partners a firsthand look at what goes into every brick we make. If you’re looking to schedule a brick plant tour on behalf of your organization, contact our team directly — we’d love to host you next. Or, if you’re ready to build, explore our bricks for sale anytime, with millions in inventory.
Want to stay in the loop? Follow us on social media @TriangleBrick across all platforms — and give @thatmasonrygirl a follow while you’re at it. For the latest industry insights, product announcements, event invites, and more, delivered straight to your inbox (without ever spamming you), subscribe to The Brick Beat, our monthly newsletter. Subscribe here!
Ready to build better with Triangle Brick? Visit our Design Center in Durham, NC to meet with our Certified Brick Specialists and explore our one-of-a-kind Brick Garden, where you can see real brick and mortar combinations outdoors, day or night. You can also browse our full product selection online or reach out anytime to talk through your project needs. With extensive inventory across North Carolina and Texas, we make it easy to get the right brick, right on time.
