Karl Gurcke

Rather more specialized than the title suggests, this book is mostly concerned with the industrial archeology of bricks in the Pacific Northwest – Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. However, the first few chapters are an interesting introduction to the technology of brick making, reminding me how apparently simple technology is actually quite complicated. Author Karl Gurcke covers hand made bricks, hand molded bricks, hand cut bricks, machine molded bricks, dry press bricks, and more other manufacturing methods than you can shake a brick at.

Any old technology acquires a specialized jargon, and brick making is no exception. A group of brick workers is called a stool. A lump of clay of the right size for molding a brick is called a waulk and forcing it into the mold is called waulk flatting. Green (shaped but not fired) bricks are placed on the ground and spattered (smoothed with a flat board on a long handled, sort of like a concrete finisher’s float), and, when dry enough, skintled (turned on edge so the other sides can dry). Air drying is finally finished by hacking (building low walls from the bricks, with spaces in between); the place where this is done is a hackstead. Finally they are loaded into a kiln to be fired – if the kiln is temporary – built of the same bricks that are being fired – it is called a clamp or a scove. Finished bricks are shuffs (incompletely fired and scrapped); place bricks (more solid than shuffs but still not high quality); grizzles and samels (increasingly well fired but still only suitable for non-load bearing situations); stock bricks (the lowest quality that is suitable for load-bearing work, and further divided into common stocks, picked stocks, grey stocks, rough stocks, washed stocks, and shippers). Bricks of still better quality are malms, rough paviours, hard paviours, and facing paviours. A broken brick is a bat, but only if it has at least one good end. (Gurcke notes that the terminology varies with time and place).

The archeology section is still interesting but less fascinating. Other than brief mention of brickwork in ancient history, Gurcke concentrates on brick history of the his area. I was surprised to find that most bricks in early Northwest history were imported from England or the eastern US – a pretty long distance for a low-value cargo, especially considering it was coming round the Horn. (However, Gurcke notes that bricks were popular for ballast, because their shape made them less likely to shift in a storm than cobbles or beach rock; the fact that they could then be sold at the end of the voyage must have made up for the low value). Local brick industries did get started fairly early, but specialty bricks – especially fire brick – was still being imported in the 20th century.

Gurcke debunks that notion that you can tell the age of a building by brick size. Although brick size was standardized at different dimensions several times, the standards were largely ignored and each brick yard made its own sizes – generally shaving a little off the standard to save material, and possibly also due to the tendency of men to exaggerate the size of their bricks. About the last third of the book is an appendix listing the brands (marks impressed into the brick) of every brick company in the US that Gureke could identify.… (más)