Copyright © 2017
John F. Oyler
January 26, 2017
The C. P. Mayer Brick
Company
The Bridgeville Area Historical
Society’s January “Second Tuesday” program was a comprehensive review of the C.
P. Mayer Brick Company, brickmaking in general, and the unusual hobby of brick
collecting. Based on the variety of comments and questions it is obvious this
was a popular topic.
The facilitator began with a
brief overview of the brick-making process. Raw materials include sand
(silica), clay (alumina), lime, magnesia, iron oxide, and water combined in
fairly specific proportions. The mixture is then ground very fine; mixed well;
and fired at temperatures well over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Mayer Brick Company mined
shale on the site where the brick yard was located in Kirwan Heights, close to
the place where Mayer Avenue crosses the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad today.
The brick yard was built there in 1903 to take advantage of the shale deposit,
a deposit that included all of the necessary constituents for good brick in the
right proportions.
The shale was ground up on a
Stevenson Dry Pan, screened on two Dunlap screens to remove oversize particles,
mixed with water in a Freese Pug Mill, and fed into a “brick machine” which
extruded a continuous strip of wet material eight inches wide and three and a
half inches high. At some point a cutting machine separated the strip into
individual bricks of the correct width.
The unfired bricks were then
loaded onto pallets and transported into ten drying tunnels where the moisture
content was reduced to about five percent. They were then loaded into six
Wilson kilns where they were gradually heated to maximum temperature, a process
taking forty eight hours. The exhausted waste heat from the kilns was used as a
source of energy for the drying tunnels.
At its peak the Mayer Brick
Company could produce either 20,000 paving blocks or 30,000 of the smaller
house bricks in a day. They employed forty workers in the winter, expanded to
sixty in the summer. William Der was the superintendent. It operated until the
early 1950s.
As an example of brick-making
before the days of mechanization, the facilitator showed a short clip from the
movie “The Last Brick-maker in America”, a wonderful film starring Sidney
Poitier in the eponymous title role as a master craftsman made obsolete by
modern methods. It neatly shows a one-mule-power pug mill, hand molding
individual bricks, and batch firing in a primitive furnace.
Mr. Mayer was a leader in every
venture in which he became involved; brick-making was no exception. The
facilitator showed several examples of his contributions to the “Common Brick
Manufacturers Association of America”, as reported in technical magazines. In
one case he advocated that the Association form an insurance company strictly
for their own members, a recommendation that was eventually implemented. Mr.
Mayer also received patents for two brick-making inventions – a turn table to
facilitate positioning bricks in the kilns and a compressed air system to
remove particles of unfired brick from the pieces before they were fired.
The mention of the Association
prompted a member of the audience, Judy Oelschlager Dames, to tell us about a
memorable experience her mother had in 1924. Employed as Mrs. Mayer’s
companion, Judy’s mother travelled with them by train to Los Angeles for the
Sixth Annual Association convention. One of Judy’s most precious possessions is
her mother’s ticket booklet which describes the trip in great detail. It will
be the subject of a future column.
The fact that one of the
facilitator’s numerous eccentricities is his hobby of brick collecting is
fairly widely known. He gave a brief description of IBCA (the International
Brick Collectors Association) and some of the unique characteristics of this
hobby. Brick collectors are not allowed to purchase bricks; bricks are acquired
by finding them or by trading them with other collectors. Brick collections
take up a lot of space for storage and require pickup trucks for transport, a
dramatic difference from stamps or baseball cards. Nonetheless it is a
rewarding pastime, enjoyed by a very special group of people.
The local IBCA representative is
Jean Bear, a resident of Washington, Pa. She is easily the most knowledgeable
person in the Association with regard to Mayer bricks. The facilitator showed a
photograph of a small part of her collection, which included thirty six
different designs of Mayer paving bricks.
There is a local (Bridgeville)
legend that the Mayer Company provided bricks for the Indianapolis Speedway in
1909, stemming from a trip Mr. Mayer is reported to have made to Indianapolis
at some point. The facilitator explained that there is considerable
documentation that “the Brickyard” was paved with bricks supplied primarily by
the Wabash Clay Company in Veedersburg, Indiana, supplemented by five other
Indiana brick yards. There is no evidence that the Bridgeville yard was
represented in this venture.
Next month “Second Tuesday” will
occur on Valentine’s Day, February 14. We plan to discuss “Downtown Bridgeville
in the 1940s”, focusing on the businesses on Washington Avenue in those days.
We meet at 7:00 pm in the History Center, on the corner of Station and Railroad
Streets.
