#MundaneMadness - Brick Roads

This is my first post using the #MundaneMadness tag created by fellow Steemian, @robertandrew. I'm surprised that it took me this long to do it considering that everything that I ponder on in any given day is quite mundane. There is plenty of material rocking around in my brain to work from!

When I was growing up my father was in the military so we were always moving around. Sometimes we'd be in the country and other times we'd end up in the city. I remember the first time that I encountered brick roads was in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio where I lived while dad was deployed for a while. There is an old area of town where the roads were still made of brick and boy were they bumpy! I imaging that they still are, but I haven't been back home for some time.

Back then I kind of disliked those old roads yet I had an appreciation for them.

Amanda and I on a brick path in Alexandria, Virginia

When horse drawn carts started to really pack the streets and automobiles began to emerge, it became clear that plain old dirt paths and gravel were no longer cutting it.

Bricks had already existed for hundreds of years, and were a very common building material by the late 1800s so they were readily available to solve the ever increasing problem. A man by the name of Mordecai Levi (Wow, what a badass name) was responsible for coming up with this new method of building roads here in the United States.

His first project was an experiment. With financial help, he paved a section of road on Summers Street in Charleston, West Virginia. I was paved completely with bricks, making it the first brick road in the United States. The benefits of using bricks instead of dirt and gravel became quite apparent very quickly. In those days, after a storm the roads would become completely unusable as the water would wash away the rocks and leave huge muddy holes that were quite dangerous to travel across.

By 1873, Levi had managed to pave an entire city block with bricks. It didn't take long for it to became the stardard way of paving roads pretty much everywhere. This method revolutionized roads and really helped to solve many of the heavy traffic problems of the time. It's kind of comical to imagine all the horses and old Fords racing around each other at 10 MPH screaming and pumping their fists at each other.

The process of how the roads were to be built was actually patented by ol' Mordecai himself. First, the ground would be prepared by grading it or filling it in as necessary. Then a layer of sand, stone, slate or gravel would be added on top. After that, a second layer of material such as asphalt or similar was added. Lastly , a final layer of sand would be added followed by the bricks. Generally the center of the road would be slightly raised, presumably for drainage purposes.

The one thing that I found fascinating and unexpected about brick roads is that apparently they hold up better than asphalt roads. To illustrate this, asphalt paved roads must be replaced more or less every 15 years, while bricks often last more than 100 years.

Brick paved path in Virginia

So next time you get annoyed riding down a bumpy brick road, remember how much less a tax burden that road is compared to it's smoother counterpart!