Brickmaker

Bricks are made from locally available clay, typically dug up on the property where the bricks are desired. Clay differs from regular dirt by being inorganic; in this part of Virginia, clay is all the silt and sediment pushed down the rivers towards the Chesapeake Bay. Every square foot of this colony is a potential brickyard!

We really don't find Brickmakers serving apprenticeships as other trades do. The person responsible for overseeing brick production for a client typically learned the process by being born into a family that makes bricks, not too differently from how a lot of farmers start out. Most of the labor force that ends up actually doing the work of brickmaking tended to be enslaved labor, often provided by the client.

Bricks were quite expensive, in fact. While the typical price for brick doesn't stray much beyond five or ten shillings per thousand bricks throughout the century, the resources a client has to provide makes brick too pricey a building material for many Virginians. A client would be expected to provide the land where the brickyard would be set up, sand to dust the molds and lay the new bricks out on, and all the firewood necessary to eventually burn the bricks. Add to that the necessity of providing enslaved labor to actually mold and stack all the bricks, and you see why most Virginians lived in wooden houses.