and many more in the prosperous decades of the eighteenth. Baltimore
had great brick kilns and drying yards. Clay mines were everywhere and
spread westward with southern migrants. Three decades before West Vir-
ginia’s creation, a brick factory was founded at New Cumberland. By the
s there were more than fifty clay mines in the state. Some specialized in
firebrick for the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Others supplied the wherewithal
for ordinary folks to realize their domestic dreams.^30
Consider ordinary black citizens of Gloucester County, Virginia, who as
late as the s, thirty years after emancipation and male suffrage, still
dwelled mostly in houses of wood with chimneys made of sticks and daub.
These folks’ champion—and a champion of brick—was Thomas C. Walker,
born a slave in , a graduate of Hampton Institute (a decade or so after
Booker T. Washington), a schoolteacher, an attorney, a Republican office-
holder, and a public-spirited entrepreneur. Walker founded the Gloucester
Land and Brick Company, which during the s bought up farmland as
agriculture declined, sold it to aspiring black landholders, and made low-
interest mortgages. ‘‘Brick’’ in the company name captured Walker’s goal
to rid his people of dangerous chimneys in favor of beautiful, permanent
ones. A half-century later, in the aftermath of a modern exodus that took
almost million Afro-southerners away to other regions, many of those
who remained in Gloucester and similar, small-town and rural places, had
acquired brick houses. Down in eastern North Carolina, automobile com-
muters (black and white alike) to work in paper mills and factories lived
in brick ranch-style houses strung along highways. For all the miles of alu-
minum siding on southern houses, the dream of brick had come true for
many.^31
Brick construction as a standard for civilization is ancient, and not with-
out complex poetics. In , for instance, Albion Tourgee published a
sequel to his best-selling novel about Reconstruction in the South,A Fool’s
Errand, titling the new bookBricks without Straw. Tourgee, born on a north-
western Ohio farm in , became a Romantic idealist while a student at
the University of Rochester on the eve of the Civil War. Although blind in
one eye since the age of fourteen, he eagerly enlisted in a New York volun-
teer company and a short time later was badly injured during the Union
retreat from the field at First Bull Run. He nonetheless returned to war as
a lieutenant in an Ohio outfit the next year, fought at Perryville, and was
wounded. Tourgee was also once captured and spent four months in Con-
federate prisons before he was exchanged; then he returned to war yet again
and participated in the early stages of the struggle for Chattanooga, before