Brick Association of North Carolina Newsletter Articles

‘The Brick Stops Here’ Monthly Newsletter Articles

Perfecting the Art of Imperfection: Handmade and Tumbled Brick

What’s so special about handmade brick? According to Art Burkhart, vice president of sales and marketing at Old Carolina Brick Company in Salisbury, the perfection is in the imperfection.

“It’s the distinguishing marks like fingerprints, folds and uneven comers that give each handmade brick its individual character,” said Burkhart, whose company is the nation’s largest maker of handmade brick. “The people who choose handmade brick want authenticity. They want the best.”

Authentic handmade brick—available from only five companies nationwide, including BANC members Old Carolina Brick Company and New London Brick Works—occupies the niche at the highest of the high-end residential market.

At Old Carolina Brick Company’s Salisbury plant, six mud throwers produce as many as 160,000 brick per week. Besides restoration customers, Old Carolina is finding a growing market in newly-constructed “celebrity homes.”

More than a million Old Carolina Brick went into a Columbus, Ohio, home, stables and guest house built for Leslie Wexner, founder and CEO of The Limited, Inc. The company’s brick have also been used in homes built for Indy race car driver Bobby Rahal, NASCAR legend Junior Johnson and singer Mariah Carey. Robert Redford’s new home will be built of Old Carolina Brick.

Burkhart said 74 percent of the eight to nine million units his company produces in an average year are used in new residential construction. The remaining 26 percent are used in restoration work. In all, Old Carolina ships about 92 percent of its product out of state to 30 states and parts of Canada. Burkhart said his product costs about twice as much as machine-made brick.

“We consider ourselves at the top end of all of it,” said David Frame, president of New London Brick Works. Frame’s company makes all its handmade brick to order, specializing in custom-matching colors and creating unusual sizes and shapes.

Tumbled Brick

For more typical new home buyers and a few, mostly small commercial project owners, tumbled brick achieves the one-of-a-kind look of handmade brick at mass-production prices.

“Tumbled and simulated tumbled brick has a lot more character than plain brick when the sunlight hits it,” said Randy Jarrett, distributor sales representative at Isenhour Brick & Tile Company. “That’s what people want instead of a plain looking wall.”

Of BANC member companies, three—Cherokee Sanford, Pine Hall and Boren—produce true tumbled brick, whose irregularities come from physically tumbling green brick before firing. Nearly all BANC members have devised mechanical means to simulate the tumbled look.

Sanford Brick Corporation, now part of Cherokee Sanford, was North Carolina’s first manufacturer to make true tumbled brick. “They were making it in the early ‘80s in a very small way,” said Cherokee-Sanford President Bill Brown. “They hated it because it was very difficult—very labor intensive. But the results were good, and people bought it. Now it’s become one of our top products, and we think demand will continue to grow.”

Brown said the market for tumbled brick in the mid-1980s was primarily in high-end residential construction. More recently, however, builders have begun using tumbled brick in lower-priced homes.

“Very rarely do you see tumbled brick in a starter home, but today, we see the market expanding to homes in the $175,000 to $200,000 range,” he said. “High-volume tract builders are trying to get people more interested in their offerings, so they might use tumbled brick as a special touch on a front or in a foundation or steps. It’s a way to add a little curb appeal to the house.”

Member companies offering tumbled or simulated tumbled products seem to agree demand will continue to grow. Currently, these companies estimate tumbled or simulated tumbled units account for 20 to 35 percent of their total output. Most said true tumbling adds 15 percent to the price of brick. Simulated tumbling adds about six to ten percent.

For most manufacturers, the exact methods used to create tumbled and simulated tumbled brick are closely-guarded secrets. Some companies have even secured patents on their equipment designs.

“Companies are always attempting to find better ways to duplicate the look of handmade brick,” said Phil Liles, sales manager for Lee Brick & Tile Company. “But how we do it and how we save money doing it is a secret.”

Color & Texture

Most sales representatives interviewed attribute the success of their tumbled and simulated tumbled lines to color as well as texture.

“Sometimes from the street, the color is what catches your eye more than the texture,” noted Brown. “The combination of the two is what’s aesthetically pleasing.”

“Brick selection is a color-texture decision.” said Ted Corvey, marketing manager at Pine Hall Brick. “You have to have both to be successful.”

For the typical consumer, the differences between authentic handmade brick, true tumbled brick and simulated tumbled brick are difficult to detect, particularly once the brick is laid.

“What everybody’s trying to get to is the old handmade brick look,” said John Carter, Isenhour Brick’s vice president of sales. “Some manufacturers and sales representatives put a lot of emphasis on the differences between what they call true or genuine tumbled brick and simulated tumbled brick. What the consumer is looking for is the end result in the wall.”

“Do consumers care whether it’s true tumbled or simulated?” asked Corvey. “If they do, it’s because a true tumbled brick is going to be more realistic looking than a simulated tumbled because it’s much harder to get that randomness using a mechanical device. If somebody likes the color and the look of a handmade molded brick and that’s out of their price range, they move down to a tumbled or simulated tumbled brick. It becomes a cost decision.”

“The beauty of true tumbling is in the random patterns,” said Phil Liles of Lee Brick & Tile Company. “It’s a very inconsistent look. With the simulated tumbled brick, there is a limit to how much character and texture we can apply to a brick without having it become too labor intensive.

“The simulated tumbled processes allow the manufacturer to keep the cost down by not interrupting the machinery,” added Liles. “As a result, we can produce a very competitively-priced brick with some features of a tumbled or molded look that fits budgets where people want that look but feel like they can’t afford it.

“The nice thing about brick is, like a lot of products, consumers need a variety of choices,” said Brown. “You have demand for everything from basic red brick, sand-coated brick and textured brick all the way up to handmade custom brick. There are different market niches for the different products, and that creates opportunities for our industry.”

High School Programs Key to Filling Demand for Masons

Nationwide, there were 129,000 brick masons and stone masons working in 1992, and the U.S. Department of Labor projects the demand for masons will reach 167,000 to 200,000 by 2005, depending on economic growth. In North Carolina, the 4,361 total of brick masons working in 1989 is expected to grow to 4,974 by 2000.

Where will the new masons come from?

According to Jim Lunsford, director of vocational and technical education in Cabarrus County, most could—and should—come directly from our high schools, but only if we change some fundamental attitudes.

“The construction industry is one of the few places left where a kid can develop a salable skill and go into it right out of high school,” said Lunsford. “But we glorify the professions, and our educational system is geared to support the person who’s getting a PhD. What we’ve got to understand is that a PhD is not a ticket into the new economy. It’s going to be geared to the technical, skilled person.”

Of an estimated 15,000 North Carolina students who completed high school trade and industrial programs in 1993, 42 percent, or 6,300 young people, planned on entering the work force with no further training or education. Overall, only 25 percent of North Carolina high school graduates go on to earn a four-year college degree. Many of the remaining 75 percent go straight into the work force.

“As I read the economic tea leaves, our country’s stability rests on that segment of the work force we’re putting the least emphasis on, to our detriment,” said Lunsford.

“Other countries recognize that 75 percent who don’t go to college are driving the work force, and they are willing to invest in them. But we have the worst school-to-work transition program of just about any industrialized nation. While we shuffle the kids who aren’t going to college off to flip hamburgers, other countries are training them on their best industrial equipment. We’re going to pay a price for that.”

Despite his concerns, Lunsford need look no further than his own county’s vocational program to see a masonry program that is working.

At Mount Pleasant High School, the masonry program taught by Doug Drye since 1989 has consistently produced more than its share of skilled graduates qualified to enter the work force at graduation. The program, with 36 to 50 students, is one of two in Cabarrus County high schools.

Mount Pleasant students have won the state bricklaying championship every year from 1990 to 1993. Two state winners went on to win national championships. A large percentage of program graduates are working as masons, including Mount Pleasant graduate Scott Helms.

At age 20, Helms has operated his own masonry business for its first full year, a year Helms said included “lots of 12-hour days because I love masonry and I want to get ahead. There’s big money in it if you’re willing to work.”

Scott Helms completed the Mount Pleasant masonry program in 1991. The same year he placed second in North Carolina’s Final Four Masonry Competition. “I won my region two years in a row,” he added.

Currently, Helms Masonry is working two crews of five or six men each and Helms says he plans “to get as big as I can get and still keep my workmanship the best quality.”

The success of the Mount Pleasant masonry program is based primarily on Doug Drye’s teaching skills and his love of masonry. Drye himself completed the Mount Pleasant Masonry program in 1968 and went on to work 19 years as a mason before beginning his teaching career.

“Masonry gets in your blood,” said Drye. “It’s a rough job, but it’s rewarding. It takes your hands and your brain to build something out of masonry, and you get a lot of pleasure looking at it when it’s finished and for many years after that.”

One of Drye’s goals for his program is “to make masonry something we could be proud of.” Drye said, “Masonry students were looked down on when I was in high school. I wanted to change that. I wanted to turn out some students who’d make masonry look good.

“If you win three national awards, you gain a lot of respect,” he said, adding the recognition also translates into tangible contributions to the program. “I could not ask for better support than this community gives,” said Drye, naming a half-dozen area masons and brick manufacturers who donate money, materials and expertise to and recruit employees from Mount Pleasant’s masonry program.

Although programs like the Mount Pleasant one are encouraging to Lunsford, he believes attitudes still need changing. “Sometimes I think parents would rather their children be unhappy lawyers than happy, well-adjusted electricians and masons,” he said. “We just don’t invest enough pride and prestige in our technical work force, and not enough money either. It’s a mind set that’s costing us dearly.”

Brick Work Reveals Historic Clues

When Wilmington architectural historian Ed Turberg looks at the brick work on the city’s oldest house, he notices more than the distinctive Flemish bond. The house—a two and one-half story brick structure built in 1740 by Edward Mitchell of Charleston—has convex white oyster shell mortar joints.

“The nearest equivalent of that type of mortar work is in Charleston,” Turberg said. “That tells us not only the owner, but his builders and masons were from the Charleston area.”

Turberg has recently been researching downtown Wallace and Faison in Duplin County to prepare an application for the National Register of Historic Places. If the application is approved, owners of historic buildings can qualify for a 20 percent federal tax credit and a five percent state tax credit on renovation costs, providing incentives for downtown revitalization.

Speaking of the brick work he’s observed in the communities, Turberg said, “They have a particular pattern they like to put in the face of the building and there’s nothing like it in Wilmington. I think it has to do with regional ideas.”

Turberg said brick work can provide a wealth of historic information, ranging from broad cultural influences to the identity of the individual mason who laid the brick.

“Unfortunately, we can’t date brick the way we can date wood,” he added. “We can take a wood boring and count rings to come up with a date for when the wood was sawn and cured. But other than distinguishing between handmade and machine-made brick and recognizing certain patterns, it’s hard to date a building by its brick work.”

One historic advantage of brick is its durability and permanence. “Brick will remain for generations and often remain unchanged,” Turberg said. “The brick buildings tend to retain their original architectural character over a long period of time.”