Dutch brick
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, founded in 1591, was originally built of red Dutch brick.
Dutch brickmakers emigrated to New Netherland in America, where they built kilns for firing bricks locally.
The Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, South Africa, was built in 1666, and its entrance was made of the small yellow bricks called ijselstene (IJssel stones).
[4] Until well into the twentieth century the manufacture of brick in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) used manual labour mostly, and the low-paid workers involved in the industry were as marginal socially as the manufacturing industry geographically—the raw materials were gathered on river banks, and the firing of the bricks took place well away from towns and farms to lessen any nuisance caused by fire and smoke.
[5] The clay for the bricks was dug from river banks (of the Waal, Rhine, and IJssel rivers) and other open-air locations, and was left outside (in a mound called the kleibult) through the winter so that any organic material could decay;[6] the weather (rain, frost, drought) helped make the clay more manageable.
Ovens came in two types—a single-use construction of the kind used in the production of charcoal, and a more permanent type, basically consisting of two walls one metre and a half thick.
[9] An 1888 report noted that "in New York and other Atlantic cities we find houses built of brick brought from Holland [sic] fully two hundred years ago, without a flaw or sign of decay, and apparently as firm and sound as when first laid in the wall".
Brick farm houses built separately from barns are found in Zeeland, but none have survived in other locations.
[16] In recent years the Dutch brick industry has attracted unwelcome attention from the European Union (EU) competition authorities.
In the early 1990s the industry had excess capacity due to technological advances, competition from other materials and an economic slowdown.
Producers with combined market share of 90% agreed to reduce capacity, shutting down the older and inefficient plants.
In Dartmouth, a house built in 1664 for mariner Robert Plumleigh had traditional timber-framed architecture but included elaborate star-shaped chimney stacks made from imported Dutch brick.
[21] Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, founded in 1591, was originally built of red Dutch brick.
[22] Jigginstown House in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland, was built by John Allen for Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1593–1641) using Dutch brick "of the most superior manufacture".
[13] Houses were gable-ended, often with stepped designs, and the bricks ranged in colour from yellow or red to blue or black.
[28] A New Englander who visited New York in 1704, forty years after the Dutch had yielded the town to the British, admired the appearance of the glazed brickwork of the houses of "diverse coullers and laid in Checkers".
If so, it would have been one of the last genuine Dutch-style houses to be built in the United States, reflecting the conservative Dutch culture of Albany at that time.
The walls, which are massive, were made of Dutch bricks that had been brought as ballast in ships from the Netherlands, and they were coated with Chinese plaster.
The country house of Johannes de Graaff, who commanded Sint Eustatius from 1776 to 1781, features a 10.2-by-3.0-metre (33.6 by 9.7 ft) duck pond made of brick.
