CALIFORNIA BRICKS
Brand name: CH
Years: 1870s
Type: Red common duty
Description: Two letters spaced widely apart are impressed on a face.
Comments: Bricks were made specially for the San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco, CA. Numerous brick manufacturers
from San Francisco and Oakland provided the bricks and stamped the bricks with CH, which stands for City Hall. This
is unusual because most bricks are usually stamped with the maker's name, not its destination. However, the
variations in these bricks demonstrate that they are not from a single company when comparing them side by side.
Local brick manufacturers who supplied the City Hall with brick as gathered from the
records of San Francisco included G. Oliva, P.N. Carroll, D.S. McDonald, Clauss Witt, Theodore W. Peterson,
G.D. Nagle, Thomas D. Tobin, Merrill & Black, Remillard Bros., Patent Brick Co., Diamond Brick Co.,
Hunter & Shackleford, E. Wilson & Co., William Sharon, J.S. Bellrude, Eli Bonnet, Philip Caduc, Michael J. Kelly,
Thomas Boyle, and John Tuttle. Note that none of the maker's initials match C.H.,
which verifies the 1884 report written by State Geologist Henry Hanks, who wrote:
"The initials C.H. impressed in the brick of which our new City Hall is built, put there to denote that they were
intended for that edifice, may (should they prove to possess the lasting properties claimed for them) become to
the antiquary of the remote future a source of much worriment as he labors to decipher their probable meaning."
Source: Museum of the City of San Francisco, Cannery Shopping center, San Francisco; San Francisco Municipal
Reports, 1871-1881; Hanks, 4th Report of the State Mineralogist, 1884, p. 144.
Comments or questions are welcomed.
Please send email to Dan Mosier at danmosier@earthlink.net.