Historical Brick Collecting :)

[Slug]

Long Beach, CA, 7/23/2006
Article Launched: 07/23/2006 12:00:00 AM PDT
Collecting feels like a ton of bricks
Hobbies: Group of 1,000 gathers the stones of history.
By Eric Leach, Staff writer
http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_4084108
Slug’s words in italics.

My precious fellow historians, an interest in history is one of the things that brings us together, among other things such as food, politics weapons etc. This interest in history, can lead to all sorts of different fun activities.


SIMI VALLEY - Some people collect dolls, some collect seashells and some collect barbed wire.
Or action figures, models, bar-b-que sauces, hot sauces, baseball cards, plastic army men, drinking establishment tee-shirts, comic books, ACG copies, Mad, guns, edged weapons, dust, etc.

Then there's the International Brick Collectors Association, and people like Ron Rose.
We need him as a guest speaker to follow Doctor Sinster at our convention.

The group's 1,000 members hoard tons of bricks, especially those with symbols or scenes etched on them. Rose, who owns Rose Family Funeral Home in Simi Valley, has amassed about 1,300 in the three years he's been collecting.

This is an example of one of the bricks collected by Mr. Rose

Some association members have Web sites showing off their bricks, marked with images of everything from buffaloes to spiders, Roy Rogers to Abraham Lincoln.
Rose has pictures of nearly 900 posted on his site, http://rosebrickyard.com/ including one with a Nativity scene and one embossed with an image of the Last Supper.

Frank Clement, a retired construction worker from New York and a past president of the association, said his prized bricks include one with an Indian arrowhead he found on the fireplace in a historic Ohio building.

When he built his ovens at Sutter's Fort in the 1840s, California pioneer John Sutter took a couple bricks as mementos and put them in his window, apparently making him the state's first brick collector.

The Kansas Museum of History displays a brick reading "Don't Spit on Sidewalk," from an early 20th century public education campaign to help fight tuberculosis.
We have members who live in Kansas. They should stop what they are doing, check this out and make a thread.

Jim Graves, the Brick Collectors Association historical secretary from Wichita, has a couple of the "don't-spit" bricks in his own collection and said they can still be found on some Kansas sidewalks.

Graves has about 4,000 bricks and has put together a listing of 32,000 brick plants that operated in the United States over the last 150 years.

Members meet in various parts of the country at three swap-meet-like gatherings during the year and trade bricks.
Do any Armchair General Members collect bricks as a hobby?
I could put some in my garage....
Your questions or comments are always welcome.
Thank you.
Slug