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Read "The Story of of Old Carolina Handmade Bricks"

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Old Carolina Brick Company, Genuine Handmade Bricks

The classic, antique beauty of Old Carolina Brick is created by hand. Each brick is hand moulded in the colonial tradition of craftsmanship and lasting beauty.

Hand Moulded Brick Adds Character
Machine Made Brick Can't Deliver

Based on a commitment to quality and authenticity, Old Carolina Brick are each hand moulded and then fired with coal to provide the beautiful bisques and unique colors identical to those seen in brick made over 200 years ago. Our hand moulding operation imparts distinctive folds, finger marks, and other surface irregularities which make each brick individually characterized. From the largest architectural project to a beautiful new residence or to the smallest do-it-yourself fireplace, Old Carolina handmade brick will give that unique appearance unequalled by conventional machine made brick.

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We View Snippets From Our Feature Shown on Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs

The Discovery Channel's Mike Rowe, host of the popular Dirty Jobs series paid our factory a visit for a feature that aired in May of 2008.

The episode featured mud throwing and coal flashing, two necessary in creating handmade brick of the highest quality and appearance.

View snippets of the show on our videos page »

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The Genuine Handmade Brick Professionals Trust

Primarily used on new, fine residences throughout the country, our handmade brick are also used on numerous historical restorations in Monticello, Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, and Charleston. Old Carolina brick add a characteristic warmth and flavor of history to any design home.

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The Art of Handmade Brick

Old Carolina Brick Company brings hand-molded brick back to the built environment. The American love affair with brick has been part of our history from the beginning. The ardor may have cooled with the advent of machine-made brick, but the current enthusiasm for handmade brick has brought passion and character back to this ubiquitous building material.

Read the rest of our May 2009 write-up in Period-Homes.com by Nicole V. Gagné »

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The Story of Old Carolina Handmade Brick

The history of making brick by hand can be traced back thousands of years to the early Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations where clay from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and Nile Rivers were formed by hand and left to dry in the sun. Later, in about the third millennium BC, the brick makers discovered that heat applied to the bricks would greatly increase their durability and be much more resistant to cold and wet weather conditions. This enabled the construction of permanent buildings where harsh, cold and wet conditions prevented the use of earlier mud brick. The early field kilns were fired with either wood or coal.

The Romans used fired brick and they introduced their brick making technology to many parts of their empire, including Europe and Britain. Later, during the colonization of America, the ships bringing settlers often held handmade brick as ballast in their holds.

The art of making brick by hand was brought from England and Holland to the American colonies by craftsmen who would set up a brick making operation at each construction site. They would gather the local clay and throw clumps of it into their set of wooden moulds, which they carried from job to job. After sun drying, the brick were stacked into piles or field kilns and fired with either wood or coal, which imparted unique colorations to the brick surfaces.

Old Carolina Brick has preserved this ancient art of making brick by hand. Although our operation is modernized and automated, we have kept the process of throwing the clay by hand into wooden moulds. Our skilled mud throwers form a clump of clay into a wedge shape, roll it in sand, and drop it into a wooden mold. This hand moulding operation imparts distinctive folds, finger marks and other surface irregularities which make each brick individually and uniquely characterized.

Colonial brick makers used a batch firing process which made control of quality and brick durability rather difficult. After the forming operation, Old Carolina brick are fired in a modern tunnel kiln to assure a consistent high quality and structurally durable brick. We have, however, reintroduced the process of firing with coal so that the brick have the same warm and earthy colors found in brick made hundreds of years ago.

After firing, Old Carolina brick are then blended and packaged on a modern monorail into our unique double pack cube. This type of package, which uses extra strapping half way up the cube, insures the brick arrive at the job in perfect condition. From the clay mining to final shipping of the brick, full quality control measures are used in our plant operations to achieve a beautiful, durable, and well blended brick in the wall.

We offer a full line of shapes and pavers, as well as arches of all types. And we offer expertise in matching any brick in size, color and texture to those in numerous historical sites. Please advise us of the type brick and desired quantity or send us a photo or sample of the brick to be matched and we will be glad to offer a matching brick.

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