Liz2976 said...
Walking in the woods today in Westfield, MA we came accross a small brick structure (maybe a hearth?). The bricks were labeled P.V.B.C. After reading your site, we noticed you have a pic of a Pleasant Valley Brick Company brick. We were wondering if you had any more information about this company, this brick, and where it came from. Could there have been another P.V.B.C? Thanks!
June 7, 2009
Liz.
ReplyDeleteI don't recall exactly, where the brick in our "collection" was found, although I seem to recall it was in an area where it was reasonably likely that Connecticut brick could well be found along with other known CT and NY branded brick. Since the P.V.B.C. initials matched the Connecticut firm of Pleasant Valley Brick Co., for which we have a record of existance, and since for which, we haven't found a NY nor Massachusettes manufacturer with P.V.B.C. for initials, ... Pleasant Valley ... stands reason to be a likely candidate for the ownership of those initials. There is a Pleasant Valley in NY but they had no brick yards of record there. Conceivably there is / was a manufacturer in MA that could have used the PVBC initials. We have long lists of MA manufacturers but none that match up with PVBC. Each year we find "new ""mystery" bricks. and each year we solve a few.
Compare your brick with the one pictured in the "Collection" If the letter fonts look identical then there is a pretty good chance that the manufacturers may be the same.
On the other hand if one brick's letters are boxy looking and the second brick's letters have rounder conponent parts they still may be that of the same manufacturer. We can say this because there appears to be a style of frog and letters theme that moldmakers used at various points in time. ...particularly in a region, ... and these themes may be seen in the bricks of other manufacturers that used molds of that maker during that period of time. We caution that this is not a perfect science but our comment is predicated on evidence in fact.
--Fred Rieck