I didn’t notice anything special about the brick as it was going in.
It was just a brick, like the hundreds of other salvaged bricks I’d gotten from Ben King, compliments of the demolished County Home in Loysville.
It was heavy. It was red. It was maddeningly different in size and thickness from its brethren, but that was because it was handmade. The natural variation in size and color is what makes handmade bricks charming, right?
My knees were aching. My back was twinging. My fingers were raw from stone dust. It was a brick like any other. I made a dust bed for it, dropped it in place, and pounded it home.
Next brick!
It was only a month or so later, as I was topping up the grout in the new patio, that I noticed the strange shadows. I kneeled down to get a closer look, and saw…
Footprints.
Or rather, pawprints, clear as day, making tracks across a single brick in the center of the patio, then vanishing.
I wrote about these salvaged bricks in a series of pieces from December, 2009 to January, 2010. If you’re curious, I invite you to take a look at them in my Op-Ed archive at www.matthewolshan.com. Look for the articles titled, “Following a Red Brick Backward in Time.”
The County Home in Loysville was under construction when Silas Wright mentioned it in his History of Perry County in 1873, a date that jibes with a plaque Ben found when he was taking down the Home.
Which means that the bricks in my front patio were most likely raw Susquehanna clay about 1870.
In those days, brick-making was arduous and labor-intensive. Clay was sifted, wetted, packed by hand into molds, trimmed, laid out to dry for about a month to lower the moisture content, and then fired.
(If historic reenactments are your thing, I can recommend an excellent Youtube video on www.susquehannahistory.com called “Throwing the Mud: Pennsylvania Brick Making” that shows just how arduous and labor-intensive the process was.)
Drying was an important stage in early brick-making. Too much moisture in the bricks would make them explode in the kiln. The newly formed bricks were laid out in a yard, often under a temporary roof, and left alone for a few weeks. In time, they’d develop “leather,” a kind of surface crust. But when they were fresh from the molds, the bricks were impressionable.
It’s not terribly unusual to find mouse tracks on handmade bricks. The mice would go after bits of grain that were stuck in the clay.
And where there are mice, there are cats.
My best guess is that the pawprints on my special brick were made by a cat. I came to that conclusion after comparing them to other cat tracks, including some very old ones.
As long as people have been making bricks and leaving them out to dry — which encompasses all of recorded human history — there have been animals padding around the brickyard. For instance, there’s a superb example of a cat track preserved in a Roman brick from the Vindolanda Fort in Northumberland, England. The fort dates to 95 A.D., which makes the brick almost two thousand years old.
Surely there are even older examples from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
The Vindolanda brick also showcases a fine pair of dog prints. Other Roman bricks from the area bear prints from weasels, sheep, horses, pigs, cattle, and domestic fowl.
In fact, there’s an entire field called “ichnology” which is solely focused on the traces of animal activity. There are modern ichnologists, who might be interested in a brick imprinted with cat prints, for instance, or in Iron Age human footprints; and paleoichnologists, whose interest lies exclusively in the fossil record.
I don’t claim to be any kind of ichnologist. I’m just an amateur bricklayer, haunted by the traces of a cat who was chasing mice when the County Home in Loysville was rising from its foundation, and a war hero named Ulysses S. Grant was calling the shots down in Washington, D.C.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 19 January 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
