“Brickmaker + Farmer”: Damariscotta River Brick Making in the Nineteenth Century and the Traces of Maine’s Agro-industrial Past

A once vital rural industry has left some visible traces along the banks of the Damariscotta River in midcoast Maine (Figures 1 and 2). First-time visitors to this area may find the physical features of this landscape difficult to make out, as they are largely overgrown and seemingly of a piece with the surrounding natural splendor. On closer examination, however, careful observers may find sites where the natural contours of the bluffs have been excavated. Nearby, overgrown remains of systems of paths and roads lead from these excavated areas toward the riverfront, where decaying timber platforms and earth-and-stone wharves extend the series of artificial features into the water. Here, too, on the banks of the river, onlookers will encounter the landscape feature most at odds with the notion of the pristine: countless human-made bricks are littered along the shoreline in massive, deep deposits that sometimes extend a good distance inland. The bricks are occasionally caught up in the root systems of ancient, gnarled trees, lurking just underneath a thin layer of topsoil and grass, or covered in seaweed and barnacles like everything else in the tidal zone (Figures 3 and 4).

These landscape features stem directly from the presence of a brick-making industry along the banks of the Damariscotta River that operated for hundreds of years but that was most active for the seventy-five-year span between 1825 and 1900. The unnaturally flat areas amid the bluffs are the former quarries where laborers extracted the clay from the earth. The wharves jutting out into the river not only facilitated the loading of bricks onto awaiting vessels but also in some cases provided the brick makers with a large, flat surface for drying the freshly molded (“green”) bricks, as well as a place to construct the semipermanent kilns. The multitudes of cast-off bricks resulted from the inefficient way in which the bricks were fired; firing could produce an abundance of over- and underfired bricks that were unsuitable for construction purposes and therefore could not be shipped.¹

Figure 1.

The Damariscotta River area and surrounding region.

Map by Jørgen G. Cleemann. Map data courtesy of DIVA-GIS.

Moving inland from the riverfront industrial landscape reveals an agricultural landscape consisting of fields, woodlands, and farm buildings in varying degrees of preservation. Significantly, these farm buildings commonly take the form of the connected farm complex, a distinctive vernacular architectural type. The architectural historian Thomas Hubka argued that this building type facilitated the kind of “home industry and mixed farming” that struggling New England farmers practiced in order to make ends meet.² One notable example of a Damariscotta River connected complex is the Brick House, the Perkins family’s farmstead that dates to 1837 and is the centerpiece of the Brick House Historic District (BHHD), a fifty-seven-acre parcel of land that also includes an extensive historical agricultural

Figure 2.

The Damariscotta River Region.

Map by Jørgen Cleemann. Map data courtesy of the United States Census Bureau.

landscape (Figure 5).³ Like so many other saltwater farms in the area, a portion of the BHHD’s river frontage served as a brickyard in the nineteenth century. On a site like this one, the physical adjacency of former brickyard to former farmland makes the interrelationship between these two spheres of activity highly visible (Figure 6).

Figure 3.

Thick deposit of bricks along the banks of a stream feeding into the Damariscotta River, Newcastle, Maine.

Photograph by Jørgen G. Cleemann, 2011.

Figure 4.

“Brickyard Beach,” Dodge Point Reserve, Newcastle, Maine.

Photograph by Jørgen G. Cleemann, 2011.

To understand the creation of this agro-industrial landscape requires exploring the historical conditions that created and sustained a brick-making industry along the banks of the Damariscotta River. As the United States expanded west in the decades following...