‘Pratt Brothers’ brick still abundant
By Nancy Slator
Some local buildings are more local than others. Jack’s of Minnesota, for instance, and Larry’s Shoes and Mike’s Auto Parts, all downtown shops, are partly made of Pratt Brothers bricks – bricks made of local clay in a factory just five miles east of town.
The Pratt brothers, Frank and Sam, owned the Paynesville Brick and Tile Company for six years before World War I. Frank Pratt, now a retired minister in Paynesville, said he and his brother bought the factory from a Litchfield man who had started it.
Over a million Pratt Brothers bricks were laboriously produced. “With 10 men, we could make 20,000 bricks a day,” Pratt said. “But there weren’t many days that we made that.” Sometimes the weather didn’t cooperate, sometimes the machinery needed fixing, sometimes there were problems with the clay that was dug at the foot of the hill near the railroad bridge on County Road 34.
“It wasn’t a facing brick, just a common brick” that the factory produced, Pratt said. The buildings that used them are “backed up” with them. Facing bricks are used for store fronts. “A facing brick has to be a harder brick – a real burnt brick.”
To make bricks, the Pratts would “run it (the clay) through a pug mill to stir the clay all up together before we put it into the brick machine.”
Bricks came out of the machine the proper width and height, but in one long strip “like baloney sausage,” he said. They were cut, four at a time, piled onto carts and hauled outside to be dried.
Bricks were stacked in a “rick,” half an inch apart so the wind could circulate around them, Pratt said. Then they were stacked, and adobe kilns 25 feet wide built around them. It took seven or eight days to burn a kiln of bricks.
Sam Pratt, who died in Alaska two or three years ago, whittled stamps for the bricks. One said “Pratt Brothers,” and another “PVB&TCo” Paynesville Brick and Tile Company. The wooden stamps were used to mark the wet bricks as being from the local factory. There was no pattern to which the bricks got stamped. “Every once in a while we stamped one,” Pratt said. “That is, he did. It took time, because it was all done by hand.” Marked bricks can be still easily seen on the outside walls of the buildings in town that used them.
The brothers were optimistic when they bought the factory, Pratt said. “Like kids, we thought we could make it go. And we would have, if they hadn’t taken my brother.” Unlike Frank, Sam had no children when war broke out in 1917, and he was drafted. On top of that, the government put a quota on the number of men the brickworks could employ – five, only half a full crew. So the factory was closed. But a million bricks are left to remember it by. (Paynesville Press, Thursday, October 18, 1979, Used With Permission of the Paynesville Press)