Brick by Brick

The threat of paving over Galesburg's past

By Micah Riecker, Knox News Team
The Register-Mail, November 23, 2003

Gene Gunther, 94, stands on Division Street in Galesburg. The man and his construction and paving business were responsible for laying many of the brick streets around the city.

GALESBURG—Gene Gunther’s office is a throwback to the days when form followed function, when rustic simplicity wasn’t just a buzzword for advertising a simpler way of life. His desk is rectangular with smartly squared edges, a mug crammed full of pens the only decoration. There is no clutter, no miniature rock gardens or stress balls. It is as no nonsense as the man that sits behind it. Gunther is 94 years old and has been a partner in Gunther Construction since 1927. But his handshake is still a vice grip.

Many people have lived in Galesburg their entire lives, Gunther included, but he is special in a way that few can claim. He is a part of the town’s history. He was a supervisor, working with brick laying teams, for Gunther Construction. He helped pave the way for a fleldgling Galesburg to rise out of the prairie.

“We started in ’23 and laid till roughly the latter part of the thirties,” Gunther said. “I’d say, all in all, we laid about 25 miles plus of brick streets [in Galesburg.]” He remembers the days he spent under the sun with striking clarity. The way Gunther describes it, a present day citizen would be struck by how quiet it was when the crews worked. He remembers the laughter, accented with grunts as men hauled bricks around. He remembers the soft chugging of a steamroller as it pressed bricks into the ground. But mostly, Gunther remembers the people.

“There was never much noise except maybe the crew talking. They’d talk about everything,” he said. “Our brick crews were probably 90 percent black and they were always real jovial, real hard workers.” But one man sticks with Gunther more than the others, a brick setter named Ernest Vicknell.

Crews working for Gunther Construction as general labor handled odd jobs such as building the concrete base the bricks were laid on and carrying bricks to locations so they could be placed. Vicknell was a brick setter, a tough job that paid better than general labor but demanded a strong physique and uncommon stamina. Vicknell was the best.

“Ernest was a tremendous high school athlete but he was a real slender guy,” Gunther said. “When he laid brick, his hands moved so fast you couldn’t even see them. Now, brick setters were paid by the square yard, not by the hour, and a square yard is roughly 35 bricks. So obviously, they wanted to keep moving.”

In July of 1924, Gunther and his crew were working on Grand Avenue. Vicknell was laying bricks. “Vicknell was a real show man. If there were people watching, he would really pick up the pace,” said Gunther. And on that day, Vicknell laid 64,687 bricks, setting a world record. George Burgland, a brick collector and amateur historian, estimates the weight of each brick to be eight pounds. Vicknell laid 517, 496 pounds of brick in one day, moving at a rate of 108 bricks per minute. Gunther remembers it. He remembers his crews and the quiet of the city. But the memomory of Ernest Vicknell, and of the hundreds of men that worked to pave the streets of Galesburg, is being paved over one street at a time.

Galesburg is paving over and selling off pieces of its history. There was a time when all the streets in the city were brick, when bricks made in Galesburg could be found lining streets in Paris and helping to hold up the Panama Canal. Now, the City Council has voted to reduce the total mileage of brick streets from 12.7 (as of March 3, 2003) to 3.4 miles and to sell surplus bricks to Cobblestone Warehouse in Omaha. It’s a divisive issue, there’s no other way to say it,” said Mayor Bob Sheehan, “A lot of people say get rid of them, they’re worthless, and a lot of people say that they’re our connection with history.”

In 1878, Galesburg was just another midwestern town trying to find a foot hold in the prairie. Just under 40,000 people lived in and around the main city, but two of them made a very important discovery. Two men, while in the Upper Court Creek area (present day East Galesburg) found clay. Burgland said, “Two Knox professors found all this clay which turned out to be really exceptional stuff. They also happened to know about vitirification.” Burgland described vitrification as a process that uses massive amounts of heat, in the case of the bricks 1700 degrees, to cook the bricks. It is similar to the processes associated with finishing pottery using a kiln.

The two professors, whom Burgland names as George Churchill and Thomas Willard in an educational paper he wrote on January 7, 2002, had found a serendipitous moment to enter the brick making industry. Burgland said, “A lot of it was just luck. The clay they had, it was called blue shale, turned out to make an excellent paving brick when vitrified.” Why was vitrification such an important break through? Burgland said that the previous brick making practice was laying clay cut into brick form underneath the sun to dry. These “sun dried” bricks made adequate building materials, but could not bear enough weight or weather well enough to be used on roads. Burgland said, “The bricks they made absorbed very little water, just 1 percent absorbtion. Sun dried bricks are porous and tend to soak water up. Now, that means that when winter comes and those bricks have absorbed water, they’re going to crack when the water freezes and expands.”

The luck continued. Churchill and Thomas were quick to capitalize on their discovery and involved three local businessmen in their enterprise: Joseph Stafford, J.H. Calkins and John Stewart. Together, they convinced Burlington Rail Road to lay track into the Court Creek area. With a means for exportation so close and a seemingly limitless amount of clay, they formed Pioneer Paving Brick Company in the same year that they had discovered the clay. However, with the quality of the product they were selling, it was only a matter of time before they would start to attract outside interests. “A guy from out east, Purington, he was a big manufacturer of bricks already on the east coast,” said Burgland. “Here was a company right next to a rail line, an unlimited supply of clay, and off he went in consolidating all of it.” The year was 1898 and Purington had consolidated all brick making facilities in the Court Creek area.

Production at the plant was massive. Considering that production began in the late 1800’s and continued until 1975, a huge number of bricks were produced. Also, consider that as early as 1898, the plant was producing 300,000 bricks per day, or around 60 million bricks per year.

Burgland relates a story illustrating the reach of Purington pavers in his paper, “Purington Brick Company.” In it, he tells the story of a soldier serving in World War 2. “In 1944, Gordon Walberg, with the U.S. Army, found a Purington Paver while crossing a field in France. After asking around, he discovered that his brick was actually a plane-to-plane bomb left over from World War 1. Heavy objects were taken up and dropped over another plane in an effort to disable/crash the other aircraft.” Burgland said that bricks were often used as ballast on American ships heading to Europe, and incidentally, were also used in paving streets.

In the 1920’s, Gunther Construction began paving the streets in Galesburg. It was during this time that the brick industry in Galesburg peaked, and then began to decline. One of the reasons for the downfall of Purington Pavers was the switch to other paving surfaces witnessed in the 30s. Gunther said, “We switched to asphalt in the latter part of the ‘30s and laid asphalt over top of the brick streets.” With the demand for their product drying up, Purington had to switch to other bricks, what Burgland calls “face bricks”. The change was not for the better.

In 1959, The Alton Brick Company bought the Purington brick manufacturing facilities. The timing could not have been worse. Massive amounts of first coal and later gas were needed to work the kilns that fired the vitrification process. The energy crisis affected production to the point that the plant was officially shut down in 1975.

Pieces of the plant still stand like tombstones in East Galesburg, crumbling with neglect. The grounds are currently owned by Marge Schott. She has done nothing with the property since her husband, one of the Alton brothers, left it to her when he died. Graffitti is on the walls and broken glass is on the ground. Sheehan says that people still go and “fish around for things” but mostly; the old plant is a home to rumors of Ku Klux Klan meetings and ritual sacrifice. All that is left as a physical memory of a booming time in Galesburg are the streets. And those too are disappearing.

Harland and Joanne Goudy live on Jefferson Street, which had its brick surface paved over this spring. Both, starting when their street was paved over, have been active in preserving brick streets. “We both like original things, things that are genuine,” Harland said. “And they [brick streets] are not in every neighboorhood.” Joanne added, “And we obviously don’t think that brick streets should be everywhere, you need to have some asphalt streets.”

However, the Goudies know first hand about the problems associated with paving on top of brick. “One thing that is lost is the height of the curb,” said Joanne, “When there’s no curb, cars go right up onto the grass. And asphalt isn’t always an improvement.” She said that brick streets don’t crack the way that concrete does and because of that they don’t need as much patching.
The Goudies have other reasons for wanting to preserve the brick streets. “There are safety reasons,” says Joanne, “Kids ride their bikes on those streets, and people walk on them. Motorists drive slower on brick streets and when you pave them over, it attracts more traffic to the area.” Harland, a retired art professor from Knox, adds that green and red are colors that go together well, adding to the aesthetics of a neighboorhood.

Cost, says Gunther, is the single most deterrent factor in preserving brick streets. He said, “It isn’t the materials that make brick streets expensive, it’s the labor. Labor was cheap in those days [the 1920’s],” Gunther said. “We didn’t have unions and a general labrorer would make 40 cents an hour. Now, common labor for union with benefits included is up to $31 an hour.” Gunther also said that brick laying is much more labor intensive than putting down asphalt and because of this, it takes more time, and costs more. Gunther said, ““I had a lot of fun [laying the streets] and I enjoyed doing it,” he said. “But economically you can’t do it. They are just way too expensive.”

Sheehan agreed and added another insight. “Cost is the biggest issue,” Sheehan said. “And, our problem is that we almost have too many brick streets, mileage wise, that it’s so costly you just can’t save all of them.” The city council has decided that they can save 3.4 miles of brick streets.

Bricks were never meant to bear the weight of a bigger is better consumer economy. Gunther said that when he was laying the streets, they lacked modern compacting equipment. This means that the base the bricks were built upon was not particularly strong. “The secret of a good brick pavement is the foundation,” he said. “If it’s a no good foundation, it won’t hold up underneath and the bricks will sink into the ground.” But the streets that were built in the 1920s were not meant to hold the weight of present day freight trucks. “When we worked, we had Model T’s, and those would be used to haul bricks to a site,” Gunther says. “Those trucks weighed about 3000 pounds. A single axle today weighs about 18,000 pounds.”

It is possible that the weight of progress is too great a burden for brick streets to bear. Main Street in Gene Gunther’s time was thoroughfare for activity in the town, men in suits and hats walked with women in long dresses along quiet streets. Awnings and overhangs jutted out from buildings, covering the sidewalks, warding off rain and sun with advertising. Signs advertised hand rolled cigars and home made food at the American Beauty Resturant. Horse racing was a major source of business and the men may have talked about next weeks race while the women shook their heads and wrote it off as anti-christian. The newspapers were still a weekly occurrence. And through it all, bricks. Bricks stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, laid in neat rows.

Today is a cold day in late fall. Men in flannel shirts walk with bullet feet, hugging the sides of buildings like ships hugging shore in stormy weather. The streets are lined with mini vans and ATMs, SUV’s and electric signs. Abrupt noises punctuate the air, the bleating of cross walks, the downshifting of semis, the growl of a dead muffler. Smells hit like passing thoughts; the warmth of baking pizza, the harsh edge of exhaust. And over everything, concrete. Patches of asphalt look like small black islands on a river of pocked grey that stretch off in either direction. Underneath the madly whirling tires, beneath the noise, beneath the concrete, lies a piece of Ernest Vicknell. There are still whispers of the past, veins of brick streets, but it seems that few can hear them, or see them for what they are.

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