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Brian Larsen
A little rain didn’t slow the enthusiasm of the brick collectors who attended the International Brick Collectors Association’s (IBCA) “brick swap” held at the Grand Marais Rec Park on Saturday, June 10 at the pavilion. About three dozen people were in attendance for the swap and then an auction followed where people bid against each other to purchase their favorite bricks.
The auction was held to raise funds for the IBCA, which has nearly 700 members worldwide.
The IBCA holds three “brick swaps” each year.
According to the IBCA, “Most collectors find their bricks at random-beside a road, under a bridge, at a demolition site, around a flower bed, at a river’s edge or in some other unexpected place. A few collectors even do serious excavating, but all members who attend the swaps are eager to trade.”
Bricks are collected “for rare beauty and because each has a story.”
Three of the many bricks auctioned off on Saturday were made by the Ohio Brick Company. They were used in the interior walls of a building that would become Toledo’s downtown post office. “This was around 1910.”
The earliest bricks found were in Turkey around 7000 BC. Those bricks were made of mud and dried by the sun. Fired clay bricks have been around since 4400 BC in China. Drying bricks in a kiln began in 3500 BC. and English colonists in America used wooden molds and fired bricks in the 1600s. Today we have concrete bricks, fly ash bricks, dry-pressed bricks, extruded bricks and engineered bricks, which can resist moisture very well.
Starting in the 1800s using bricks for buildings became popular because they were more fire resistant than wood. Bricks are often marked with the emblem of the foundry where they came from, and each tells a story about our past.
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