Wow!
This little website has grown in leaps and bounds since
we started in 2005. All your comments have been fascinating to read and
it's been such fun to research answers to all your questions. Many
thanks to our resident "guru" Fred Rieck for all his expertise. Fred is
Member #969 of the IBCA (International Brick Collectors Association).
You may want to consider joining this wonderful organization.
Membership info can be found HERE. In
each IBCA Journal there's a section where Jim Graves answers brick
identity questions from readers. Jim has an extensive collection of
historical information and is the Librarian for the IBCA. I'd also like to thank Andy van der Poel for his contributions to the website and for providing transportation for our research trips on the Hudson. Andy has compiled a complete list of his collection (which is also serves as a great aid in identifying Hudson River brick).
Happy New Year and Happy Bricking!
--Don Bayley, Webmaster (IBCA #1347)
We are pleased to offer George
Hutton's landmark book, The Great Hudson River Brick Industry
at a Special Discount Price for all visitors to BrickCollecting.com.
George had first-hand experience in brickmaking at the Hutton
Company in Kingston, New York.
"Without this writing, essential
technical information would have vanished forever." --William Minnock,
President (retired), Powell and Minnock, Brickmakers
"George Vandeusen Hutton passed away
in 2008. He was a very learned gentleman. I think we can all appreciate
the completion of his book, now in its 3rd printing." --Fred Rieck
At the beginning of the twentieth
century, brick manufacturing was the dominant industry on the Hudson
River. One hundred thirty manufacturers employed seven to eight
thousand workers. It was the largest brickmaking region in the world,
supplying vast amounts of this most essential building material to the
fastest-growing city in the world. Spanning three and a half centuries,
this industry ceased to exist in the year 2002. Included here are
accounts of technological innovations, manufacturing methods, periods
of enormous production, and wrenching business crises that transformed
the entire industry.
Visit our Store for other books on bricks and the Hudson
River.
Brick Collecting?
Collecting old branded brick is a growing hobby. Some call it
a crazy hobby, but to find, touch and own a piece of history can be
very rewarding...and fun. This web site has several main sections:
This web site focuses mainly on brick from
the Hudson Valley of New York and New England. A great source for
information on brick around the USA (and around the world) is the International
Brick Collectors Association.
Bricks were produced in many areas
around the United States and Canada where craftsmen brought their
skills from Europe to places that had the right type of clay suitable
for brickmaking and good access to transportation.
HUTTON bricks along the
Hudson River at Kingston Point Beach, July, 2006
One such area, the Hudson River Valley
in New York State, with its abundance of clay and an excellent water
link to New York City, churned out millions of bricks, mostly near the
turn of the 20th century. In Haverstraw, in Rockland County, NY, there
is the Haverstraw
Brick Museum. In the 1880s there were over 40 brickyards in the Haverstraw area. Many buildings in New York City are made with bricks
manufactured in Haverstraw. For more information on Hudson River
Brickmaking, Click Here.
At one time, the state of Connecticut
had more than 200 brickmaking companies. As a result of past glaciation
periods, many clay deposits dot the state and many of these were
exploited to make bricks. The history of brickmaking in the state is
explored in a special section of the Connecticut
Museum of Mining and Mineral Science.
From the National Building Museum's American
Brick Collection:
A variety of 19th and 20th century brick
samples from the National Building Museum Collection,
which contains more than 1,800 examples from brickyards around the
country
Brick
is one of the oldest and most enduring man-made building materials.
Sun-dried mud brick, or adobe, appeared about 10,000 years ago, and the
earliest kiln-fired or clay-baked brick dates to 3,500 BC. This marked
the first time humans were able to construct permanent, fireproof
structures without stone.
Since at least 1611, when English
brickmakers were recruited to Virginia, fired brick has been part of
the North American landscape. Indelibly tied to the colonial era, brick
came to define the nation’s industrial age and remains linked to
contemporary notions of the American factory, school, and single-family
house.
Although once manufactured with
incredible variety, brick production today is far more limited because
the material is no longer used structurally, but rather as veneer.
A labor of love,
the Museum’s extensive American Brick Collection was amassed by Raymond
Chase over 24 years. The collection now holds some 1,800 decorative,
face, fire, paving, pressed, and common bricks from around the nation.
And unlike the country’s anonymous army of bricklayers, many of these
late-19th and early 20th-century brick are branded with the name or
location of their originating brickyard, or a distinguishing mark.
We often get asked where old bricks
can be found. The best places are former brickyards, construction
sites, abandoned building sites, demolition sites, dump sites,
land-fill and beaches.
Just
a few of the many bricks found by website visitor Jason in the Bronx, NY
Bricks found at demolition site, Pilgrim
Psychiatric Center,
998 Crooked Hill Road, West Brentwood, NY, September, 2007
(Thanks
to Bill from St. James, NY for tipping us off on this location!)
Bricks found in land-fill (site now closed),
Milton, NY, January, 2007
For true brickophiles there's the International
Brick Collectors Association. IBCA members don't buy bricks, they
swap them. They collect all kinds of brick: building brick, paving
brick, fire brick, as long as they are branded with names, designs,
patterns, pictures, or numbers. The 2009 Hudson Valley I.B.C.A.
BRICK SWAP took place in Haverstraw,
NY the "Brickmaking Capitol of the World." Click Here for Photos
Some collectors build custom shelves to display
their brick
Others even have their bricks bound
Recently, we've added some new specialized
pages and sections:
Brickcollecting.com is a member of
The Industrial Archaeology and History Ring which contains sites of
interest to industrial archaeologists and industrial historians. Anyone
with suitable web content is welcome to join the ring. Eg: sites
relating to: wind & water power, steam & internal combustion
engines, coal & metal mining, iron & steel industry,
engineering, stone, brick, clay & glass industries, textiles,
chemicals, public utilities, roads & bridges, rivers & canals,
railways, ports & shipping.
