Bricks have given me problems. A good hositry of brickyards in the area has not yet been done.Lumber was so cheap that it was the preferred material, but in later years many of the houses got brick veneers, so it is very difficult to know if I'm looking at an original brick house or one that was veneered twenty years later. Sometimes I can tell, sometimes not, so I'm always concerned about my conclusions. The issue of bricks comes up a lot in the first volume on houses that I'm finishing up now. After stone, brick was the most substantial building material of the nineteenth century and was the most prestigious. The earliest known firing of clay into brick in La Crosse occurred in 1851, a remarkably early date. In the summer and fall of 1852 the first brick house in La Crosse county was built on Front street south of Main street It was 20 x 40 and served as house and store for Lake and Webster, liquor dealers. (Butterfield, p. 400). During the next two decades brick was increasingly common and by 1868 there was at least one brick yard producing over one million bricks a year. Besides George Markle’s early attempts in 1851, Valentine Weimar began a brick yard in La Crescent, Minnesota in 1856 and two years later moved it to La Crosse. In 1857 Gunkle and Bloomer began making brick in the State Road Coulee and a man named Egglehof began a brick business in the Mormon Coulee. The brickyard of Herman Keppel was begun in 1868 and produced a million bricks a year. The advantages of brick construction were emphasized by a series of disastrous fires which swept the frame buildings of the business district in 1857, 1862, 1864 and 1867. There was a long hositry of brick and stone buildings on the east coast. Those materials were associated with wealth and status. Wood was the most common and inexpensive building material in early La Crosse. That which is common and inexpensive is often considered crude. Early descriptions of the town frequently mention “rude shelters” of wood, be it log, timber or frame. As early as 1851 a brick burner came up from Praire du Chien and made a batch of bricks and then left town. There were several brick yards in the area, created where there was good clay at the foot of a coulee. There were major fires in La Crosse in the 1850 s and the town didn't have a professional fire fighting crew for a long time. I talk about that in Places and Spaces. Finally the town mandated brick or stone in the downtown, although frame buildings still are scattered about today. Brick became more popular in the 1880 s but it always had a battle against the cheaper wooden buildings. Short answer is that we had at least five different brickyards in different places around La Crosse. For special buildings special bricks were brought in by rail. Although I don't think that there are more than one or two houses that use the Milwaukee cream brick and they are from the early 20th century.
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