I think is high time we set up a national program to test the trace
elements of these early bricks and solve this question once and for
all.  Everyone send your unwanted brick to me at ...  NO, PLEASE!

Seriously, though, this has been done with Native American pottery, (such
as Bob Kuhn's work with Mohawk Iroquois ceramics) so why not bricks that
are supposedly made in certain localities?  Do analysis of local clays,
bricks from known sources, bricks from supposed (oral history) sources,
...  then we can start to do some real work on figuring out where these
most important artifacts of the archaeologist come from.

Ned's mention of finding Albany bricks at Fort Casimire brings to mind that
the bricks in early Albany (also a Dutch trading post) are said to have
been imported from Holland.  Thus, we are we to conclude that the Delaware
bricks in fact originated in Holland.  I know they are found on sites in
the Chesapeake as well.

Whether this is still believed or not, I do not know, and I hope that some
of our Albany or Dutch researchers have addressed this.  Albany sits on top
of a giant mound of the stickiest blue clay and I always wondered why the
early occupants didn't use that for making bricks and went to the trouble
to bring them all the way over the wide ocean just to build
chimneys.  Karen Hartgen's crews have been doing incredible work in
downtown Albany and perhaps they have looked into the source of these bricks.

As for turning rafts and boats into lumber for houses, this is well
documented on the Erie Canal, as well as in log rafts in many parts of the
country.  In Canada as well as larger rivers in the Adirondacks the logs
were sticked (squared) and pinned together to form the raft, with finished
lumber loaded on top and a lodge built for the crew.  I think this was done
in the upper reaches of the Deleware and Susquehannah also.  These rafts
were dimantled in the saw ports and entirely used up in various ways.

I have heard many stories (none documented within my scope of research)
that there are houses along the Erie Canal that were built from the timbers
of old canal boats that had outlived their usefulness on the water but in
which the lumber was still sound.  But ... when one considers how many of
these stout boats were put together, not with internal framing but with
huge spikes and iron rods run down through the planking every six inches,
there is little good wood left in a boat that could have been resused in
another structure.

Time for bed - 12 hours of teaching screaming elementary kids and
girlscouts is enough for me!

        Dan W.