a genealogist's sketchbook

We arrived for a visit on Saturday just as the new old bricks were being unloaded. Our builder has offered us these never-used 18th-century bricks, which he had found stacked in the basement of a colonial house in Wickford. A size and color match for the old work. Laying them will begin tomorrow or Tuesday. So for now, there are two piles of bricks in our driveway. Here, the neatly stacked new old bricks from Wickford:

And here, the still-malodorous salvage, including two sizes of modern brick (the big pile) mixed with the few surviving old blackened ones (at left).

Perhaps a year in the garden will dissipate the strong odors they hold. I saved one clump showing a couple of the old bricks still set into a chunk of modern concrete:

And here is where they’re going in the fireplace, a shot showing the current hole, and the rough two courses at the bottom of the sides of the firebox, where the bricks and concrete of the raised hearth lay against the old work: