Brick: Lakeside’s Cornerstone, Part 2 Making Bricks

Brick making is an amazingly simple process. The ideal brickyard is located on a deposit of of clay mixed with dirt. The only other raw materials are organic material – (sawdust, straw or ground corncobs), water, labor and wood to fuel the fire which will burn for a week or more to fusing together all of the individual elements into a finer, stronger mass—a building brick.

(Left:) Daniel's crew has been removing clay from the land in this location for six years. They are now working about six feet below the original surface of the land. (Center:) When the clay, sawdust and water are mixed and allowed to rest overnight, the consistency changes requiring more water to be added. The clay and sawdust absorb the water and the mixture gets stiffer and heavier. The only tools strong enough to mix the mud are the workers' bare feet. Walking and dancing and then pulling the feet out of the mud kneads the mixture with every step. (Right:) When the mixture is right for molding the workers pack the mud mixture into a handcrafted mold placed on a leveled piece of land. The top is leveled and smoothed, and then the mold is removed. The new bricks remain in place on the ground for 24-48 hours until they are dry enough to move.

(Left:) Next the workers move the bricks to the edge of the brickyard and stack them on edge for further drying in the sun. The following day all of the bricks are turned to prevent warping. (Right:) After drying for four days, the bricks are restacked into a taller herringbone pattern. The bricks are about 1” apart, allowing many bricks to be stacked in a relatively small area as they continue to cure until they are at least two weeks old. In the 1800s Europe, this stack was called a hack.

Stacking the raw bricks (which still contain 9-15% water) for firing in an open stack kiln requires more skill than any other step in the process. About half of the upper bricks have been removed from this San Antonio Tlayacapan stack at left.

The imperfect fired bricks from previous firings are used to construct the outer walls of the kiln. Multiple rows of bricks (each row is three bricks thick) run parallel to one another through the stack, which in the old days was called a clamp.

The pile is built to funnel the heat evenly through the stack and to allow the vapors and smoke to rise to the open top. The stack of bricks takes on an elongated pyramid shape. There are spaces left at the bottom of the clamp through which the fire can be fed with additional wood over the seven or eight days needed to completely fire the bricks.

The clamp allows the water vapor from the bricks to escape along with the gasses which form with the burning of the sand (in the dirt and clay) and other materials. The firing process begins with a very low temperature fire to finish drying the remaining water in the raw bricks. After a day or two, when the steam clears from the top of the clamp, the fires are gradually fed more and more fuel until the temperature reaches the 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and the bricks glow cherry red.

The heat is maintained at that level for several days to complete the chemical transformation. When the master brick maker is convinced that the process is completed, he closes  in the holes and spaces in the clamp with more pre-fired bricks, to hold the heat and ensure that the bricks will cool very slowly before they are taken from the clamp.

Mexico Insights – We Recommend:

If you are as fascinated as I by this process, I strongly suggest you watch a wonderful made-for-TV movie, “The Last Brickmaker in America.” The movie’s star, Sydney Poitier, makes bricks by hand, using exactly this process. We highly recommend the movie. 

By the way, it’s likely that part of my fascination with the brick making process draws on a bit of family history. My father’s Danish great-grandfather, Andrew Chrestensen, moved from Copenhagen to Iowa about 150 years ago. Soon after his arrival he began making the bricks that were used to build the streets and some of the early buildings in my home town, Denison, Iowa.

The brick making protocol is exactly the same today in Mexico as it was back then in Iowa and centuries before that around the world.