It’s backbreaking dirty work under a blistering summer sun, but brick-making not so many decades ago held an appeal that some men readily accepted.

It was steady work when the weather cooperated, and pay was pretty good, depending on how fast a worker could go under the grueling circumstances.

I learned a lot about brick-making at Museum L-A and in a Lewiston Evening Journal Magazine story written by noted local historian Ralph B. Skinner about 40 years ago.

Skinner’s article of Nov. 6, 1971, focused on the well-known Morin Brick Co. at Danville, which is now entering its second century of successful business. He tells of the company’s founding by “Honest John” Morin, the patriarch of a family that took the business to well-deserved fame for its product’s quality.

“Honest John,” who was born Jean Baptiste Morin in the Canadian province of Quebec, came to Lewiston with his parents when he was a teenager. He worked in the mills and married Marie Olivier, whose brother had a farm home at Danville Junction, Auburn. The property had an ample supply of clay, and here John Morin began his brick-making, building a remarkable family business with assistance of his one daughter and eight sons.

Morin’s work at the Olivier farm was brief, because an opportunity came along to work at the nearby P.M. Austin brickyard, which he acquired. It was an excellent move, because the yard had a contract to supply lots of brick for the new Lunn and Sweet shoe factory on Minot Avenue in Auburn.

His first crew consisted of six men. After two years at the Austin yard, Morin bought the Olivier brickyard and operated there until 1929. He then purchased the Webb farm in Danville, where the company is still located.

John Morin died in 1939 at the age of 72, but his sons and a very capable corps of employees carried on. A highlight of these years before World War II was fulfillment of a contract to supply a million bricks for Colby College construction. Those high-quality bricks became known as “Colby bricks” and those durable bricks with chocolate-colored ends earned the company a national reputation.

At the time Skinner wrote his story, one of the company’s valued workers was Randall Proctor, 76, who had put in 54 years with the firm. He started as a teamster and blacksmith when horses were much in use, and he came to operate every kind of vehicle and machine in the plant. Proctor was known as the only man in the yard who had no boss. He filled in where something had to be done.

Brickmaking was done only in the summer when drying and firing of bricks was possible. Men worked in bathing suits or T-shirts and bare feet, according to information in a recent brick-making exhibition at Museum L-A.

The museum material quotes Normand Davis, longtime treasurer of Morin Brick, who said, “When a local brick-maker was asked how a person could go about getting a job in a brickyard in the 1950s, he replied, ‘Come in and wait for somebody to fall.’”

Skinner’s account included descriptions of how bricks were made prior to the 1700s and 1800s. The methods were crude. A pit or pen was made to hold the clay and sand and water, and a yoke of oxen wallowed about in it to stir the mixture. Even though a machine was in use for pulverizing the clay and sand mixture when John Morin first went into the business, a horse walking around on a platform behind the machine furnished the power to keep the machine going.

The bricks had to be handled many times. They were turned as they dried on the ground, moved around on 100-brick wheelbarrows, and stacked into high kilns inside which wood-burning fires hardened them.

The kiln required as many as 1,500 cords of wood each summer, Skinner said. Woodcutting was the occupation of many brick-makers during the winter months.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by emailing [email protected].