A number of years ago, I purchased a brochure about making ACO silos through a source on the Internet. The brochure was pretty cool, but I basically stuck it in a folder and put it away in a filing cabinet for a number of years. Recently, I have been looking at ways to display the…
I have been trying to figure out a way to bring back my Brick Structure of the Month feature. It is one of my favorite sections on my website. However, it took a long time to put them together. Since I just started a monthly newsletter, I figured that medium would be a perfect way to…
There has been a bit of a break between my posts here on the MN Bricks website. I have been very busy researching and putting together a book about the Chaska, Minnesota, brickyards. In regard to that topic, I have set up a new website at www.chaskabrick.com. In putting together the Chaska brick book, I…
If you are enjoy looking around the ruins of old brickyards, the Lilydale Regional Park is for you! This park contains the ruins of the Twin City Brick Company, which was in business for many years in the Twin Cities area. This park is really a hidden jewel, basically right along the Mississippi River across…
I sometimes get questions like “where can I buy antique brick?” Or “how can I fix my old brick barn?” Sometimes these questions are easy to answer and sometimes they are hard. First of all, antique brick is not antique because it is common. Named bricks (ones with the name of the city or builder…
I know that Iowa is famous for its agriculture. When I think of Iowa, I think of vast cornfields like those in the famous “Field of Dreams” movie. Along with its agricultural heritage comes its heritage of barns and silos. Around the turn of the century and into the first half of the 1900s, Iowa…
It has been a long winter here in the upper Midwest with lots of snow and now rivers that are flooding. Can spring finally be around the corner? I am looking forward to getting out in the field again and getting some new information for this web site. I hope to get to the Princeton…
This is my first post in quite a while, as my web site has been going through a lot of changes. My webmaster is working very hard at getting our web platform switched over to a new one, and he is amazed at the amount of information we have accrued so far. Even more amazing…
My webmaster tells me that my web site needs to be renewed for a second year. What does that mean? Why, of course, it means that one year has come and gone! I would like to take this opportunity to talk a little about the past year and some of the neat things I have…
One of the things I wanted to learn when I started this web site was the number of brickyards there were in Minnesota in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I have mentioned before that some sources have said there were 50 to 60, while other sources have said there was one in nearly every…
