New Updates

The process of adding additional historical Minnesota brickyard locations to this web site is really coming along nicely.  I saw one source claim that nearly every growing frontier town in the state of Minnesota had a brickyard at some point.  I can tell you without a doubt that this statement is an exaggeration.  However, there were a lot.  And there were different time periods involved.  Minnesota was settled from east to west, so the eastern portions of the state had some of the first brickyards.  In addition, some brickyards only lasted a few years before closing.

The main thing about historical Minnesota brickyards was location.  If a brickyard started up where a good clay deposit was located, it was a major plus.  If that same brickyard had good methods of transportation at that location, it was usually a good indicator that the brickyard lasted for a good length of time.  This was usually the case for brickyards located along portions of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers.  There were also a number of long duration brickyards located along the future Interstate 90 corridor.  There are better chances of finding old photographs of the long duration brickyards.  So it only stands to reason that probably less than half of the sites that will be listed on this web site will have much information.

After some initial research, I think that many towns had brickyards in the late 1800s.  Many of these began to drop out in the early 1900s, as competition started to come into play.  Towns with bigger plants, better management, and on better clay sources put the smaller yards out of business.  I think there was another decrease in the number of brickyards around World War 1, as the work force got pulled into war duties.  These were tough economic times too.  There were a few brickyards that survived these tough times, but not too many.  To survive, some of the brickyards even combined or bought each other out.  Isn’t that how Wal-Mart got started?

Switching topics, the February Brick Structure of the Month is a Lake Mary brick farmhouse located near Winsted, Minnesota.  I found this farmhouse during a swing through that area in 2004.  Lake Mary bricks are pretty cool, a nice shade of red-orange.  There are still a few buildings standing around the Winsted area that were built of these Lake Mary bricks. 

There are many updates to the web site in the last couple of weeks.  I continue to find interesting pieces of information about many old Minnesota brickyards.  Every now and then I also come across old pictures.  I found a neat photograph of one of the Chaska brickyards.  As I have time later on, I would like to try to label the buildings that show up in the background of this photograph, to give a person an idea of exactly where this brickyard was located.  So keep looking for more, I think this is a pretty cool topic!  Let me know if you come across this web site and have additional information or pictures to share…or just to say you like what you found.