I’ve often wondered about the Gabriola brickyard. How, exactly, did they make bricks? And out of what? Here’s the answer, from an article by Jenni Gehlbach:

The first step in the process was to crush, grind and screen the shale to a fine powder in a dry pan crusher, rather like a huge rotary kitchen sieve. The crushed shale was mixed with water, and the resultant slurry was screened fine, and delivered through a chute to the press. On Gabriola, they pressed four bricks at a time in a hand-operated hydraulic press.

These green bricks must be dried before firing, and in Gabriola’s brick plant, they were stacked onto wooden carts that were hand pushed into the drying kiln through which tracks wound. When they emerged dry after a couple of days they were taken, again by hand-pushed cart, to the firing kiln. When the firing kiln was full the entrance hole was bricked up with dry-stacked bricks. At the back of the kiln were low arched holes into which firewood was fed by hand to get the fires going. [continue]