For the last several issues, I’ve added a little blurb with my article asking for recommendations on subjects related to St. Tammany history to address in future articles. I’ve done this because I consider it the sacred duty of a public-spirited, community-minded, first-amendment-focused publication like the Conifer to provide such educational content for those who have nothing else to read with their five-dollar coffee. Also, I was running out of ideas and thought this might be an easy, painless way to get some new ones.
Much to my surprise, I have received some! Many of these actually seriously suggested future topics, while other suggestions, frankly, were offensive, and in some cases, I suspect, anatomically impossible.
One of the serious ones came from a Slidell reader named Charles Neuman, who was very interested in the subject of brick making in St. Tammany Parish. He asked a number of questions - both technical and historical - about this industry, and it would take someone with far more expertise than I have to answers the questions completely. I will, however, try to pass on a little general history about brick-making that addresses some of the subjects raised.
Brick making is as old as recorded history – certainly as old as the Bible. You will recall that Pharaoh ordered Moses and the Israelites to maintain their brick production quota without providing them the straw required to do so. In a retaliatory job action, Moses visited ten plaques involving everything from frogs to firstborns upon the Egyptians. Unions were much stronger in those days.
In many ways, the art of the brick has not changed a lot since then. Through the millennia, builders have taken clay, molded it, dried it, heated it, and built civilization with it. It has ranged in quality from the adobe-like products that melted with the first rain, to the highly durable building materials we use today.
Almost every area of the world has some sort of brick industry. All you need is clay, which can be defined as “a fine-grained earthy material consisting primarily of hydrated aluminum silicates that is plastic when wet and hardens when heated.” In this part of the world, the absolute best place to find this stuff is St. Tammany Parish.
St. Tammany Parish was not blessed with gold and diamonds, or even with great land for agriculture, but by golly, we were blessed with soil that produced great building materials like lumber, gravel and bricks. We were Mother Nature’s Home Depot! Most of the streets, buildings and other structures in New Orleans until relatively recently originated on the north shore. The materials moved by schooners, steamers and Jahncke barges from our bayous and rivers across the lake to Bayou St. John and the New Basin Canal.
Brick making was prevalent everywhere in the parish. The first kilns in any concentration probably popped up along the Tchefuncte River, and the ruins of many can still be seen there. Another brick-related artifact an also be seen in the Tchefuncte. Bricks were used as ballast in Civil War area warships, and the remains of one of these can still be seen on the river bottom. Some of the ballast bricks can still be seen, but most are gone. The story is that most of the patios and barbeque pits in Covington were built from bricks scavenged from the wreck. Scattered farms and plantations, like Bernard Marigny’s at Fontainebleau, also had their brick-making kilns for on-site construction projects and possibly local sales.
The focus of the industry in St. Tammany today is Slidell, and ironically, it was to this area that brick making came last. It was not until the New Orleans-Northeastern Railroad crossed the lake that Slidell was founded and a need for bricks in the area developed. It was also at this time, in the mid-1890s, that the most famous name in St. Tammany brick making today appeared. This was when the Schneider family began their St. Joe Brick operation.
St. Joe is currently run by M. P. “Pete” Schneider III, who has been president of the firm since 1978. Pete also served as the Louisiana State Representative for the Slidell area for many years. I recently got a great tour and briefing by Pete and his son, Pete IV, and learned some things about brick making that I would never have suspected.
As said previously, brick making starts with clay, and one of the Schneider forebears found just the kind he needed in the Slidell/Pearl River area. It is in a seam that lies a few inches below the surface and extends downward for about five feet. It is part of the Pleistocene terraces that formed when glacial deposits were periodically washed down into this area over a million or so years. These terraces make up most of the parish, but this particular deposit had a consistency that made it perfect for bricks.
This clay is excavated and pulverized into a uniform consistency and then mixed with water to form a shapeable mass. This is then forced into individual molds in a mass production process. However, it is interesting to note that one mold still produces one brick. This is essentially the craftsman-like process that has been used for thousands of years. Not all bricks are made this way today. Some are made by an extrusion process that just squeezes them out of a nozzle like taffy, chops them off, and discharges them like machine gun bullets. These are the bricks you see with the holes in them. The method used by St. Joe is more labor intensive and expensive, but it produces what is considered the highest quality brick.
What comes out of the St. Joe molds is then dried for about 24 hours and is called a “green” brick. If the process were stopped at this point, you would have essentially an adobe brick. It would have no durability or weather resistance at all. This comes in the next step.
St. Joe has four kilns – three that can fire 125,000 bricks each, and one that accommodates 200,000. The bricks are “baked” in these ovens at temperatures ranging from 2240 to 2580 degrees Fahrenheit. These temperatures are higher than for most brick makers, and the reason relates to the nature of the clay used by St. Joe. It requires higher temperatures, but produces a very durable brick. It also is more expensive as it requires more natural gas to feed the kilns. After baking for five days, the bricks are cooled slowly for another four or five days. Using this process, St. Joe produces five to six million bricks a year. These are considered extremely high quality by architects of new construction and restoration projects. St. Joe is often called upon to recreate bricks for forts and other historic projects around the country.
Another interesting brick fact I learned is that St. Joe adds no coloring to the clay they use. All of the many shades and patterns you find in their bricks develop from controlling the temperature and the air flow in the kilns. Individual bricks in the same batch also may differ slightly in color or texture because of their position in the kilns. The use of sand, finer powder or water in the molds to keep the just formed bricks from sticking to them may also change the color or look.
I thank the Schneiders for their time and hospitality, and for teaching me that there is a lot more to brick making than one would think. It’s a basically simple process, but there are a lot of nuances and complexities. It’s an artistic as well as an industrial process. Thanks also to Charles for asking his questions. I hoped this helped.