Culture
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INSIDE
MR. STRANGE’S BRICK BARN
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DWELLING ON
B U I L D I N G B LO C KS
SLAVERY AT MELROSE
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COLLECTIONS
It’s in the Walls
INSIDE THE EXHILARATING WORLD OF BRICK COLLECTING Story by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot • Photos by Misty Swilley
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alking up to City Roots coffee shop, I picked out Daniel Strange and John Hicks with little difficulty: two older fellows, sitting slightly apart from everyone else, talking animatedly and conspiratorially—as though they had a secret. I pulled up a chair and asked them if they’d found anything yet. They looked at each other and smiled, then said they couldn’t tell me much—but their sources here were promising. Strange had been up since 2:30 am, sleepless with excitement—“It’s like Christmas Eve!” And on the drive from West Monroe to Baton Rouge, they traveled with eyes peeled. “We were coming down,” said Hicks, “and we saw something in a ditch we passed, a deep ditch north of Baton Rouge. We did a U-turn. 48
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“If you pass it up this time, well you never know if you’ll go down that road again.” The riches the pair sought could be rare; they could even be valuable. But they are also plainly, invisibly, mundanely everywhere—and to the untrained eye, remarkably fundamental to the point of being unremarkable. “Right when we pulled up here, we started looking at these brick buildings,” said Hicks, gesturing to the 106-year old former power plant that now serves at Baton Rouge’s Electric Depot complex. “They’re all around you. Most people don’t even see them. Just kick them out of the way, throw them through a police car or something. “But, they’re history. There’s history behind these bricks.”
The International Brick Collectors Association (IBCA) was founded in 1983, evolving out of what was first a group of barbed-wire collectors. As Chicago Tribute writer Christopher Borrelli put it in a 2016 article on the subject, “These are fanboys of the prosaic, champions of the everyday.” Today, the group consists of approximately four hundred active members spread across the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and France. Strange is the current treasurer of the group—he and Hicks being two of Louisiana’s four active members, along with Greg Duggan in Natchitoches and Terry Taraba in Stonewall. For ten and a half years, Taraba served as the association’s president, accumulating a collection of seven thousand bricks along the way, which includes representatives from every state in the mainland U.S.,
