Anyone that has lived on an onetime farm knows that evidence of the farm ’s chronicle is often left behind by the previous owners . Sometimes there are a few dusty prick left cling on nails in the barn ; other times , there are large rock piles on the bound of fields that showcase the effort involved in clear those fields . And once in a while you ’ll come across something really strange , like the leftover of a Model T railway car circulate all over the rock piles . ( Yes , I ’m familiar with this ! )
Last year , I discover a few loose brick piled next to a tree , covered in pine needles , leaves and dirt . I did n’t think much of it at the time , except that I intended to use them for a decorative task because they were impressively weather from old age . Earlier this give , I decided to gather them up and cart them to a serious location where I could make clean them and prepare them for economic consumption .
So bring my trustyyard cartand adigging shovel , I go to the brick raft and started pulling them out of the ground . Five here , five there … five more … wait , is that another 10 ? No—20 ? Umm , just how many bricks are piled here ? !
Before long , I had astonished myself by pull well over 100 bricks out of the terra firma . by nature , they were in diverge levels of decline — in fact , some were broken in multiple places . But others were in surprisingly good form ; proficient enough that I could clearly see that some of the bricks were stamped with the watchword “ Excelsior ” and others were boss with the word “ Ringle . ”
Now peculiar about the bricks and assuming that the words referenced the manufacturers , I started doing some research about older brick fellowship in my home res publica of Wisconsin . Before long , I had turned up a whole hoarded wealth trove of information about these long - locomote manufacturers , peculiarly the Excelsior Brick Company in Dunn County , which was apparently the brick working capital of Wisconsin for many old age . In fact , during the other 1920s the Excelsior Brick Company and the nearby Red Pressed Brick Company bring forth more than 12 million bricks per year !
To me , the most fascinating selective information I came across is that neither Excelsior nor Ringle have produced bricks since the early 1940s , imply that the bricks I see are more than 70 years old . How long have they been on this farm , and how long had they been sit in a blank out pile ?
It ’s not hard to make a case that the bricks have been on the farm for more than 70 eld . The b , build in the thirties , has a row of bricks above one of the doors , and while I ca n’t see if they have writing on them , they seem to be the same size of it and colour as the bricks I found in the quite a little .
It ’s also easy to see that they had been piled on the ground for a long time . While the upmost brick were protruding from the ground , the bricks underneath were position several inches into the ground — understandably a lot of leave of absence and pine phonograph needle had heap up around them over clock time , and it would be my surmisal that 10 had passed since the brick had last been disturb .
Who knew that there could be so much history shroud in a batch of previous bricks ? gratuitous to say , I ’m going to be doing some more research .
