Lucy, Tom:

The discussion surrounding the mystery of the 'Berry's Premium
Firebrick' origins (regarding two historically documented c.1800-1836
sugar boiling houses) has led met to come up with several (long-winded)
points, some of which I should have recognized at the start:

-unless a given site was immediately abandoned upon operational
commencement, when one considers an environment requiring refractory
(heat-resistant) materials such as refractory clay bricks, those
refractory materials will not be original to the date of construction
and/or beginning usage.  Flue and furnace linings continually break
down, with high-grade refractory materials breaking down slower than
low-grade materials.  Over time the structural materials backing up the
refractory linings may also be replaced, such as a
bee-hive/round-downdraft ceramic kiln which may be completely torn down
and rebuilt every 20-30 years or less.  An 'original' kiln or furnace
may be original in placement and technology, but not have one (or have
very few) original physical component(s).

-industrial installations are expensive to set up from scratch and have
a tendency towards often unpublicized reuse phases after the original
better-known phase has ended.  Their geographic setting is often
advantageous as well.  Even if a site has sustained a significant amount
of damage from some form of accident or conflict, setting it back up may
still be economically feasible.  Even if just the layout of the
operational systems can be ascertained, this is a big step towards
reaching production, especially if the site was known to be successful
in the past.  And putting people into this picture, the technology will
be more retained in experienced individuals than remnant installations.

-the essence of my diatribe is that in these sugar-processing examples,
historically documented to have been abandoned well before 1850, my
hunch is that the artifactual evidence (branded bricks with maker's
names + product names) is suggesting a later reuse date not recorded in
the literature.  Because of this I would not necessarily assume that the
brickmaker (Berry) is to be found in the pre-1850 time frame.
Qualitative terms such as 'premium', 'fire-proof', 'premier',
'vitrified', 'standard', and 'excelsior' (and descriptive terms such as
'split', 'arch', 'wedge', and 'pressed') when applied to brick brands
seem very much to have been used only after the advent of post-1850
machine-forming processes.
    Additionally problematic is that the pre-1850/machine-formed
brickmaking period is very poorly represented in the historical
literature.  The oldest examples I can find in my big Jim Graves'
listing of 30,000+ US brick manufacturers only date to 1856.  This
likely relates to the often small-scale, itinerant-craftsman and/or
single-project brickmaking that was more common before big, mechanized
and commercial brickyards emerged.

-Finally, I think further analysis of the bricks in both cases could
shed much interpretative light on these sites, if my hunches about
undocumented site reuse are on target.  But then, bricks are my soapbox.

Larry Buhr
Univ. of Nevada, Reno