Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
brickwork beyond the closed confines of the Bricklayer's Company in
London. One must, however, also acknowledge Moxon's pioneering publica-
tions,
Mechanick Exercises: OR, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. Applied to the ART of
Bricklayers Work
(1703).
Some discontented freemen-bricklayers emigrated to the American colonies
in the late seventeenth century, mainly because of a large slump in activity fol-
lowing the boom years. They took with them, as did the first craftsmen settlers,
their traditions, skills and styles to states such as Virginia and Maryland and also
founded American branches of the livery companies. Virginia was a colonial
commonwealth; particularly wealthy from growing tobacco and cotton, where a
tradition for fine brickwork grew up (Barksdale Maynard, 2000, 32).
Cut and Rubbed and Gauged Work in Early
Colonial America
As in Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, the first buildings were built in
timber, but from the earliest settling of the American colonies brick began to
be made and employed. Evidence of this has been found in the Dutch early
seventeenth-century settlement at Renselaar in the Hudson Valley and at New
Amsterdam; ceded to the British Crown in 1664 and re-named New York. As
Lucas (1997, 146) records:
Brick kilns were operative at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629 and a decade later,
in and around Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. Brickmaking in and
around Burlington in 1683 prompted the issue of regulatory laws by the General
Assembly of New Jesey. From such small beginnings a regular trade in the manu-
facture and use of bricks developed, aiding the creation of colonial, later state
capitals, at Williamsburg, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Providence and Boston, and
providing the Eastern Seaboard with specimens of colonial brick architecture
that are now revered.
Inevitably the brickmakers and bricklayers followed English practices and trad-
itions in which they were steeped. The brickmakers would have quickly deter-
mined the quality and potential to make bricks, including rubbing quality, as
were made in England. As Lucas (1997, 146) states:
A memoir of Virginia in 1623 recorded that in that colony the clay for brickmak-
ing was widespread; the desire for building in brick was already present and the
first capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jamestown was made up of houses
with brick foundations and a parish church which, after a series of timber fore-
bears, was walled solely in brick.
The brickmaking process of digging, weathering the clay, and moulding,
drying and firing the bricks was broadly based on the same English seasonal
