Thick as a Brick

Sometimes items of geological and historical interest can be as close as our own back yard.

When Karen and I bought our Gustine home back in 2015, there was a pile of old, used bricks left in a corner of the back yard.  When our late neighbor Brad saw them, he saw potential walkways and borders for our yard as well as potential handyman income for himself.  An arrangement was made, and we now have some charming brickwork in our front yard that was not there before and memories of a good guy who we were privileged to know for the last year of his truncated life.

 

Not all of the pile was suitable for use, though.  There were many fragments and cracked bricks in the pile that ended up being discarded, among them the hoary sample pictured above.  It caught my eye since it is not often one sees bricks with very prominent maker’s marks on them, especially ones that give you a clue as to their location.  With my fondness for the unusual, I kept it around and used it as a doorstop in my shop area for the last few years, always intending to look up its “Livermore” markings when time allowed.  I finally got around to it last week and made an interesting discovery.

The Livermore Fire Brick Company began production in 1910 in Livermore, CA, using clay imported from the Sierra Nevada range until a more local source could be found.  Fire bricks are used to line fireplaces, brick ovens, industrial boilers and the like, the clay being chosen for high heat-resistance and reflectivity.  Financing and construction of the plant had begun in 1908 using funds from subscription by local Livermore businessmen as well as some remaining monies from the town’s ‘Earthquake Relief Fund’ that had been given the town after damage in 1906.  Getting the place built was very much a community effort, being Livermore’s first major non-agricultural commercial enterprise.  The company operated until 1947 with a fair degree of success, although it had some rocky moments; one of its ongoing expenses was that a local source for clay was never found, although the company did open its own clay mine in Calaveras County.  After closing in 1947, it never reopened and was demolished.  The site is now a shopping center called The Brickyard, and there is a memorial plaque on site surrounded by bricks made at the plant.

My particular brick is a Livermore Star, which were produced between 1910-1917.  It is a very light salmon in color with very prominent fragments of quartz and plagioclase feldspar in evidence without

a hand lens.  The clay is a very coarse blend when compared to a brick I would find, say, at Home Depot if I went there this afternoon; I like it.  To find out more, I went to the exhaustive website of Dr. Dan Mosier, a California geologist with a love of history who has spent his life combining both.  Dr. Mosier has been collecting, studying, and researching bricks and brickmakers since the 1970s and maintains a large database of California brickmakers and their products (https://calbricks.netfirms.com/index.html).  Although the photographs I found under Livermore Fire Brick Company were not an exact match with mine, I found enough to tentatively identify it. 

For confirmation, I sent an email to Dr. Mosier including photographs who wrote that it was, indeed, a Livermore Star.  When I commented that such an artifact would now have an honored place on my rock display shelves, he replied that to him, there is no difference between bricks and rocks except that one is man-made.  And, of course, he is correct.  Bricks are clay; clay is rock.  After thousands of years of human history, we are still making our structures of sticks and stones.  The used bricks in my backyard pile, wherever they may have come from, were repurposed in walkways and borders, just as the Earth constantly reconstitutes and reuses the rocks and minerals which constitute our environment.  In our own stumbling way, we ape the geological processes around us, perhaps in unconscious recognition of our place in the system. 

Sources

Drummond, Gary.  History of the Livermore Fire Brick Company.  Retrieved 10/5/17 from http://www.elivermore.com/photos/Hist_lvr_brickyard.htm

Mosier, Dan. Livermore Fire Brick Company.  Retrieved 10/5/17 from https://calbricks.netfirms.com/brick.livermorefbco.html.

Mosier, Dan.  Personal communication 10/9/17.