About 100 buildings in RI are built from bricks made in Barrington. What's the history?
Kind of an odd question but, when you think about bricks, what locations come to mind?
Do you think about brick buildings? Do you think about places like India and China, which are two of the global hubs of brick manufacturing?
Or, do you think about Barrington, Rhode Island?
Apparently, that’s what comes to mind for one What and Why RI reader. They recently wrote in asking, “Why is Barrington such a good source of bricks? So many buildings are made of Barrington bricks.”
Let’s dive in.
What buildings are made of Barrington bricks?
First – for those who don’t regularly keep tabs on where the bricks that buildings are made from – a quick primer on what buildings are made of Barrington bricks. And yes, they are some well-known Rhode Island buildings.
Likely the best-known one is The Graduate Hotel in Providence, formerly known as the Biltmore.
Others buildings made of the bricks, according to the Barrington Preservation Society, are Barrington’s St. John’s Church and Leander Peck School, the Providence railway station, and Brown’s University’s John Hay Library.
Those are just the highlights. The Barrington Preservation Society estimates about 100 buildings on the East Side of Providence and downtown Providence were made with Barrington bricks.
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OK, so who made the so-called Barrington bricks?
In 1847, Nayatt Brick Company opened in Barrington and was reorganized in 1864 as the Narragansett Brick Company. In 1893, according to the Barrington Preservation Society, the New England Steam Brick Company purchased the brickworks.
New England Steam Brick, which had several brickyards throughout New England, attracted many immigrant workers, including Italians and Canadians from Nova Scotia.
During its heyday, there were two brick-making facilities – the Barrington Centre yard and the Nayatt yard. The Barrington Centre yard was the bigger of the two, according to Providence Journal archives, with the capacity to make about 20,000,000 bricks a year.
The brickyards brought major manufacturing to Barrington.
Scows, a type of wide dingy, would be filled with bricks and brought to Providence daily, pulled by a boat named the Sylph, according to a nostalgic piece published in The Journal in 1919 interviewing an old boat captain.
“The Slyph went to Nayatt each afternoon, carrying two or more empty scows. They were polled up the canal at Nayatt, loaded at the kilns of the Nayatt Brick Company and early the next morning they were brought to Providence to be unloaded,” Captain Phillip A. Carr told The Journal. “The old canal is still in existence, but it’s now well-choked up.”
The bricks were also transported by train.
Why is Barrington such a good source for bricks?
Getting back to the original question, what supported all of this? Why Barrington?
Barrington had large clay deposits along the Narragansett Bay. The type of clay that was perfect for making bricks.
Until, of course, it ran out.
What happened to the factories?
After removing all that clay for decades, the pits were 15 feet below sea level by the 1920s, and the workers were constantly pumping water to keep the operation running. Then, in the 1940s, the clay ran out.
That was the end of the Barrington bricks.
When it closed and they stopped pumping water out of the pit, it filled in to become Brickyard Pond at Veterans Memorial Park. Now, people can ride their bikes along the East Bay Bike Path where trains used to move the bricks, hike along the pond or boat over the clay pit.
What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com. She loves a good question.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Why was Barrington, RI such a good source for bricks?
