I feel like you might like this story-
So a few years ago, we found this brick in the woods (I'd send a picture but it's somewhere in the garage,) terracotta red brick of normal brick dimensions buried in the ground, and it had the word CALVERT stamped on it. Not the little engraving you normally see, this was moulded into the brick while it was being made. There apparently used to be a house in those woods and you can still find remnants of it, so I think this brick was either part of that house itself or from a walkway or driveway. My brother's friend thought it was like, a headstone or something, so we took it to my dad. Apparently bricks stamped like that used to be pretty normal and we've even got some local roads that are madeof bricks like this one. He says it might be as old as from 1872 and it's one of my proudest possessions. I can't believe we just found something like that buried in some random woods! It's so awesome to me
Hey! Thank you for your message, I'm excited to talk about this!
Your dad is right that bricks with an indented name, usually the brand name or location of manufacturing, used to be much more common. While I'm sure some people made their own molds and fired their own bricks for whatever project, brick manufacturing companies had molds with their company name (backwards/mirror-image so it would come out readable). Some were singles, one brick at a time, and some were a whole row.
Nowadays, extruding brick (like playdough) is much cheaper than using molds like that. Some manufacturing plants have machines that do molded brick and it is the same process (sand or water or some other nonstick agent in the mold, clay mix put in mold with force, mold flipped to remove the now formed green bricks). Some of the bigger plants, and some smaller but high end companies, still make some brick by hand in molds one at a time. Extruded brick either get a stamp with the company name (see the Belden brick below) and sometimes some manufacturing data (location and/date) or no identifiers at all.
If you go to 1:55 in this video, you can see the scale at which Belden Brick manufactures molded brick. I wasn't able to find a video online of the green bricks being flipped out of the molds and I guess I did not take a video of that process when I toured their plant.
Here's what I found out about Calvert brick:
There was a brickfield (area with natural clay deposits from which clay was mined/harvested and upon which bricks were made) in Williamsport, Maryland, USA. Allegedly, bricks were being made there as early as 1814. A guy named Victor Cushwa got his hands on that land in the late 1860s and started manufacturing brick in, your dad is correct, 1872. When Cushwa bought it, it was called "Conococheague Brick and Earthenware Co.", named after the nearby creek (water from that creek was probably used to mix the clay before it went in molds). Cushwa's company was apparently called "Calvert Colonials". They would have had wooden boxes, the interior dimensions matching the dimensions of your brick, with the word CALVERT backwards on the bottom. I am not sure when Calvert Colonial became Cushwa Brick.
The Cushwa family owned the plant for over a hundred years, during which time, Cushwa brick became a well-known name in the industry. In 1987, a british company, Steeyley PLC bought the plant. Just five years later, Redland (another british company that was allegedly the biggest brick company in the world at the time) bought the plant from Steetley.
In 2019, Brickworks (an Australian brick company) bought Redland Brick and made it part of Glen-Gery brick (which Brickwords aquired in 2018). Just as soon as the deal was finalized, Brickworks closed the Cushwa plant, laying off most of the 100 employees that worked there.
Sounds like the Cushwa plant had specialty handmade brick all the way up to 2020, though they probably said "CUSHWA" on the bottom side if anything.
In reading about all this, I also learned that the first patent (at least, according to the english-speaking West) for an automated brick-forming machine was filed by Henry Clayton in 1855. He owned Atlas Works in Dorset Square, England. I did not find any info as to when Cushwa became partially automated rather than exclusively handmade.
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