Reflection

This project started out with an interest in the brick architecture of St. Louis, but it became a story about the people who made those bricks and built the city. I just followed where the Google searches took me initially until I began to make connections between these familiar names and neighborhoods, and it became a search to find out everything I could about what used to be in St. Louis brick and mine related. Sometimes trips down the rabbit hole lasted for hours and I’d find my heart pounding when a new connection formed or a source of photos was discovered. Plenty of the information wasn’t brick related, so it didn’t make the cut, but St. Louis history is is so fascinating to me. Sometimes those hours turned up nothing.

The bricks from those days started to resemble to me the spirit of St. Louisans: solid, reliable, loyal. Residents of St. Louis have this underdog pride, maybe it comes from a history of unwanted immigrant populations making homes here, building it. We’re scrappy, we’re generous, we’re genuinely nice. Learning about the miners, seeing their pictures, having lived in quite a few homes that those guys helped build made me feel that St. Louis pride. I have a Laclede brick in my backyard, and as the project went on, holding the brick became a different experience. That thing is about 160 years old, some Irish guy that could’ve gone to church with my Irish immigrant family formed it with his hands. Maybe he got into a fist fight during the kiln worker strikes and went to jail. Maybe I went to high school with one of his descendants. And that is how my inquiry process goes, wherever my imagination goes.

I liked the juxtaposition of the incredibly wealthy factory and mine owners and the recent immigrant arrivals, always despised by those who happened to arrive in America before them, competing for hot and dangerous jobs with recently freed slaves. The entire landscape of St. Louis was different at that time, covered with Native American mounds that were destroyed for convenience, smoke stacks pumping soot into the sky. Physically the city has changed in many ways, changed around those old brick homes and buildings. But the juxtaposition of the incredibly wealthy and desperately poor still exists here today. The segregation of those times is still apparent. Attitudes toward new methods are also about the same. When the hydraulic press was invented, there was a lot of backlash from the workers, unfounded concerns about the quality of bricks, and the new way was dismissed until people realized it was better. We see this attitude about trying anything new in St. Louis (and probably around the world) today- opposition to ranked choice voting, new policing methods, better approaches to criminal justice, the merging of St. Louis City and County, etc.

Though I’m already a cheerleader for St. Louis, the more I dug into our brick history, the more I love this place. We’re seen as a grimy city of country folk, crime-ridden, a flyover. The clay mines and factories, the neighborhoods the immigrant workers built for themselves like The Hill, Kerry Patch, Dutchtown, and Dogtown represent to me our independence from the rest of the country. I feel like St. Louisans still have that independent attitude: We don’t need your help, we’ll do it ourselves.

May these homes built with St. Louis clay continue to stand as a testament to the hard working spirit of our unique St. Louis for many decades to come!

-Mary Doyle, May 9, 2021