Brick made by an enslaved person

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

A brick, made by an enslaved person, from an unknown architectural structure in Charleston, South Carolina. It is a solid style, hand formed brick with black marks from firing. The rectangular brick is dark reddish brown in color with worn surfaces, edges, and corners. The Old Slave Mart Museum catalog number, [R165], is handwritten in black ink over a small rectangular patch of white paint along the right stretcher edge of one of a brick’s faces. The same face has large patches of black firing marks near both of the header edges and there are small patches of grayish-white mortar residue at the center. The other brick face is almost entirely covered with a thick layer of mortar with the brick only partially exposed at the center. There is a small loss at one header corner and a large vertical crack running down the center of one stretcher side.

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