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Search This Site For Brick Info:
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To search the page you are on, Hit CTRL-F
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News, New Information and Updated Pages as of
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Andy van der Poel's Hudson River Collection, updated list
New Posts on the Brick Blog
Ulster Landing and East Kingston Updated.
Rosendale Cement Updated.
Haverstraw updated
LENT new (inspired by one of our Bloggers)
Champlain Brick Co. (C B Co) new
LENOX new
ROSETON and DAMSKAMMER POINT New Page!
"The Golden Age of Hudson Valley Brickmaking"
(find it on our new Links Page: "Brick Clicks")
PHOTOS: The Wall at Louis Lunch, New Haven, CT
PHOTOS: Bricks in Buildings, Walls and Walks
A Brick Industry Photo Group
Our Brickmaking History Page updated
Tales from Croton Point updated
New Books, Lower Prices in Our Store:
Dutchess Junction, NY, new page
Brickmaking on Cape Cod, new page.
Backwards Branding website "guru" Fred Rieck explains what this is all about.
"The Brickyard, Summer of 1957" a wonderful first-hand account from one of our website visitors.
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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
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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. |
Collecting old 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:
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Hudson River Brickmaking: The extent of the industry in New York and northern New Jersey, now with an interactive map version
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Our Collection: Bricks from the Hudson River Valley and New England with brief notes on the history of the yards and towns where they were made
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Visitors' Page: Here you can post comments and questions and, if you have a collection, tell us about it and post pics
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Links: Other web sites with fun and interesting information all about brick(s)
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The Olde Brick Book Store: Hard-to-find gems of Hudson Valley lore, history and mystery
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.
Also, of note is Dan Mosier's fine web site on California Bricks which has a great page on just what
Collecting Bricks is all about.
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Authors Wesley and Barbara H. Gottlock have devoted an entire chapter to the lost brickyard town of ROSETON. For more information and to order a copy
Click Here.
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Recently, we've added some new specialized pages and sections:
- Brick Clicks
- Brick Flick
- BRIGHAM Bros.
- Cape Cod Brickmaking
- Catskill, NY
- Coeymans, NY
- Croton, NY
- Danskammer Point
- DPBW: Dennings Point Brick Works
- Dutchess Junction
- East Kingston
- "E-Zine" Articles
- Glasco
- Haverstraw
- Histories of Brick Companies Still in Existence
- HUTTON Brick Company
- JOVA, JJJ
- Kingston, NY (incl. East Kingston & Whiskey Point)
- MAYONE ("The Gentleman from Ulster," a history of the MAYONE Brick Co. in Athens and Glasco, NY)
- NEBCo: New England Brick Company
- ROSE, Roseton, NY
- Rosendale Cement
- SHULTZ Brick Company
- Ulster Landing, NY
- Verplanck, NY (incl. Montrose and Crugers)
- W.A.U: Tales from Croton Point (The story of the William A. Underhill Brickyard)
- West Barnstable Brick Company, Cape Cod, MA
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 1880’s 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.
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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.
Some collectors build custom shelves to display their brick
Others even have their bricks bound
I hope you enjoy this web site and would love to hear your comments.
--Don Bayley, Riverdale, NY. (IBCA #1347)
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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.
