Brick walkway at Ohio University campus
We knew Ohio's Hocking Valley was home to many 19th century brick factories and learned the names of some of them as we walked the brick sidewalks of Ohio University's campus at Athens, but it wasn't until we searched for a geocache in nearby Nelsonville that we saw one of the old kilns that produced so many of those bricks.
The cache is long-gone, but the bricks and the kilns still exist as the last traces of the industry that once paved the nation.
Extracting natural resources like coal, clay and salt were major industries in the Hocking Valley throughout the 19th century.
Early brick makers dug clay and shale from area hills, processed and shaped bricks from the materials by hand, and baked them in the sun or a makeshift kiln at building sites. Early brick buildings in the area, like Ohio University's Cutler Hall built in 1816, used "soft" bricks produced this way.
Thaddeus Longstreet opened the first brick plant near Nelsonville in 1871. Nelsonville had five major plans operating by the latter half of the 19th century, employing an average of 120 men each.
The brick making industry grew with the growth of cities and towns needing bricks for building construction, paving mud roads and building of municipal water and sewer systems.
The Nelsonville Brick Company opened in 1877. The company manufactured brands like Nelsonville Block, Hallwood Block, Hocking Block and decorative sidewalk bricks.
Brick walkway at Ohio University
Nelsonville Brick expanded in 1880, adding more kilns and manufacturing nearly 25 million block and bricks each year. The kiln where we found the geocache was part of the 1880 addition.
Brick-making was a slow and laborious process in the late-1800s plants.
Miners dug clay and shale out of crude open mines with steam shovels. Some companies bought material from coal companies that could easily mine for clay and shale at the same time that they mined coal.
Workers loaded shaped clay and shale bricks into the coal-fueled beehive kilns by hand. It took two days to load a kiln, six days to fire the bricks, and three more days for the bricks to cool before workers could unload them.
Variations in brick color depended on placement within the kiln, and the resulting temperature variance, or whether the brick was clay (cream colored) or shale (red).
Brick pavers are usually heavier than structural facing brick used for building construction, and most of the Hocking Valley brick makers specialized in paving bricks.
Salt glazing, produced by shoveling salt into the fire at high temperatures, gave Nelsonville Brick pavers a distinctive finish and made them more watertight. The company won first prize at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis for their Nelsonville Block pavers.
In 1910, one brick trade magazine reported that several Hocking Valley-area brick plants added new kilns and equipment.
The combined capacity of Nelsonville Brick's two plants was 100,000 bricks per day by 1910. The Athens Brick company reported employing 135 men and producing between 65,000 and 75,000 per day that same year.
Southeast Ohio had a national reputation for quality bricks, shipping millions of bricks to places like Chicago, Canada, New York and Michigan. We recently found a small brick-paved walkway around a gazebo in the village park at Franklin, Michigan, made with Hocking Valley bricks.
The Hocking Valley brick industry slowed around the time of World War I, when increasing use of concrete reduced demand for the more labor-intensive and expensive process of bricklaying for paving streets.
The Nelsonville Brick Company closed in 1937, and most of the remaining Hocking Valley brick plants were gone by the end of the 1940s.
In 1979, restoration work began on the old kilns. Nelsonville established Brick Kiln Park in 1980 on the grounds of the former Nelsonville Brick Company.
The Nelsonville Area Chamber of Commerce gained stewardship of the park as the result of a donation in 2008, further restoring the structures and working with Industrial Ceramics students from nearby Hocking College who maintain the kilns as a community service program.
My story, Back to school at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, includes a photo of Cutler Hall and some of the school's vintage brick streets and walkways.
My story about Franklin, Michigan, The town that time forgot, has a photo of the park gazebo and its brick walkway.
Want to learn more about Nelsonville and the surrounding area? Check out Little Cities of Black Diamonds by Jeffrey T. Darbee and Nancy A. Recchie.
© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved
Hi Dominique -
What a cool story. I really love old bricks. Their colors are warm, comforting and they are interesting to look at. Plus, in older cities like Detroit, they have so much history. Sometimes I see them poking through the asphalt on my travels and try to imagine how many workers it may have taken to lay them down. The same with our old, industrial buildings.
Thanks for posting this!
Charlie
Posted by: Charlie | April 14, 2011 at 05:58 PM
Thanks, Charlie!
I can certainly understand the appeal of bricks for you.
I was fascinated with the bricks I saw at Ohio University in Athens when we first visited there, and I ran around taking photos of them. Then, I fortunately had a camera with me when we were wandering around that gazebo in Franklin, Michigan (looking for yet another geocache!). Now I'm always checking out old bricks to see if they might be from the Hocking Valley. I love seeing the different names on them, and I especially like the colors and textures of the older bricks on the Ohio campus.
I remember seeing some ads about the for the brick paving industry when I researched this story. The brick-making industry was so labor-intensive, I can only imagine how many workers it took to pave and entire street or neighborhood with bricks.
Posted by: Dominique King | April 14, 2011 at 08:36 PM
I have found a large font Hocking Block Paver and was wondering if there is a site that sales them or can you get them anymore, I have read the information about the company. would like to have more of them.
Posted by: Debbe | July 22, 2013 at 01:02 PM
Hi Debbe-
I'm not aware of any place personally where you can find the pavers, but I Googled the term "hocking brick paver" and saw a few places that offered vintage hocking brick pavers for sale. It looks like the price will depend on condition and availability, though.
Posted by: Dominique King | July 23, 2013 at 06:31 AM
My neighbor has several hundred (probably 200-400) Hocking Valley pavers they would like to sell. I don't know price, but if you are interested let me know and I will pass along your info. They live close to Dayton, Ohio. They want to sell all. Not a few at a time. They don't have internet access.
Posted by: Karen | September 10, 2013 at 01:56 PM
I have come across several hocking valley block pieces I think may be from Saginaw street in flint how do I check?
Posted by: stevesrygley h | April 12, 2015 at 08:11 PM
I don't collect or sell bricks, so my best suggestion, as it was when I answered this question a couple of years ago, is to Google the term "hocking brick paver". You'll still see some places that sell the pavers, and they may be able to help you in your search.
Posted by: Dominique King | April 13, 2015 at 03:04 PM
How interesting! When we moved to the Athens area 20 years ago we bought an old farm house that the two tier patio is laid with Athens Block and Nelsonville Block. I'm getting ready to tear up the bricks and wondered what I might do with them, Now after reading the history, I've decided maybe we should keep them. How nice to read "the rest of the story".
Posted by: Marcy | September 16, 2015 at 01:30 PM
Hi Marcy,
Sounds like you should keep your bricks to me! I love finding pieces of history and finding out how to use and re-use them to preserve them :) Good luck with re-purposing your bricks.
Posted by: Dominique King | September 17, 2015 at 04:23 AM
Just took a tour of the Darwin Martin house in Buffalo, New York and were told the bricks were shipped from Ohio. The Martn House is a Frank Lloyd Wright! He used only the best materials so no surprise the bricks are from Ohio!
Posted by: Elizabeth Lynch | May 22, 2016 at 02:19 PM