Cultural Landscape: Industrial Landscape

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Industrial landscapes develop around specific industrial sites. Many industrial sites are in villages or cities in Vermont. But there are industrial sites that are in neither, especially ones that are based around a natural resource, such as stone quarrying. Utilitarian industrial buildings, quarry holes, small collection of caretakers houses, and the like, may be clustered together, but distinct from a surrounding farming landscape or from a village or city, and have an entirely different character. Especially if the site is from the eighteenth or nineteenth-century, look for the natural resource it is based on. Twentieth century sites may be unconnected to the natural resources, but owe their location to some other human factor.

Shelburne's Industrial Landscape

Brick House from 1840

Shelburne has a number of brick houses dating from the early nineteenth century. During that time in Vermont, virtually all brick was manufactured locally from local materials using simple hand techniques. There is considerable evidence that the brick for the houses was made in Shelburne.

An old town history mentions a brick kiln site in the northern part of town in the 1840s, and an oral tradition still exists in town about the kiln's location. Investigating the site showed a large, squarish pit in the ground (possibly where clay would have been kneaded), and a myriad of broken bits of old brick all through the adjacent corn field.

Hand made bricks

Extensive clay soil, an essential raw material, extends all throughout the eastern half of Shelburne, and ran directly through the historic brick kiln site. (The clay soils were deposited on the bottom of a glacial lake at the edge of the melting continental glacier about 12,000 years ago.)

There are at least ten brick houses nearby that date to the same time that the brick kiln is reported to have been operating. At one of those brick houses, the owners had recently repaired an original brick wall and had found handprints and other obvious signs on the bricks that they had been hand made.

The nineteenth-century brick houses were built as farm houses and villages houses, but for us they are a legacy of a time when even bricks were made by hand with materials immediately at hand.

Historic topographic maps online

Other Resources:
Look at your local library or historical society for:

• industrial census information
• Henry F. Walling's maps from the 1850s
• F.W. Beers' atlases from the 1860s and 70s
• Hamilton Child's Gazetteers from the 1880s
• Walton's Vermont Register and Almanac starting in 1818
• town histories
• old postcard and photograph collections.