Shipping Bricks

[cplain]

Seeing posts about ordering bricks jarred my memory about two notable events regarding shipping of bricks (I used to be really good at Trivial Pursuit)...

In my home town of Milwaukee, in the late 1800's, the immigrant Poles decided to build a Basilica. They found out a Federal building in Chicago was to be demolished, so they bought it. The architect went down and reversed engineered the building...Each block was carefully measured and numbered for a best fit in the new design and hardly any stone was re-cut or went to waste. A large field nearby was used for material storage and sorting as it came off the railroad flatcars. Local lore has it the unloading and then transportation to the site was all done by hand!

Basilica of St. Josaphat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


But my favorite story is about "the largest object ever mailed..."

“By far the largest object ever moved through the Parcel Post System was a bank. Not all at once, of course, but practically brick by brick. When W. H. Coltharp, in charge of building the Bank of Vernal, Utah… The bricks which Coltharp wanted were produced by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, located 427 miles from Vernal. Instead of paying four times the cost of the bricks for them to be shipped by wagon freight, Coltharp arranged for the bricks to be shipped in 50-pound packages, through the Parcel Post Service, a ton at a time. The Salt Lake City and Vernal postmasters as well as the Uintah Railroad, all responsible for hauling the bricks became frantic as tons of bricks piled up….In the end, all 40 tons of bricks were delivered for Coltharp's bank.”

Shortly after that, postal regulations were changed!

http://www.treas.gov/offices/domesti...ory_final1.doc

[Frances]

Haha ...

So that's the reason is so *ç&%& hard to get anything larger than a teaspoon sent by post!