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Saw something weird on a reclamation job in Portland
I was tearing down an old garage near Division Street last Tuesday and found bricks from the 1920s with a weird zigzag pattern pressed into them. Turns out they were made by a local company that went under in the Depression. Anyone ever run across old marked bricks like that on a demo job?
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rowanbennett8d ago
Three of them, actually. I pulled a whole stack of "Hoffman Bros." bricks out of a chimney in Southeast back in 2017, and they had this same kind of stamped diamond pattern, real deep cut into the clay. That company was one of the bigger ones out here before the market crashed in '29, and they used a special kiln process that left that pattern from the firing racks (or so I read on a local history blog once). Keep an eye out for any with a faint blue-grey streak on one side, that's from the iron in the clay they used from a now-closed pit out near Estacada.
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kelly.robin7d ago
Notice that pattern fading away over time... it's like everything old has a story buried in it if you just look close enough.
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