TALES FROM THE FIELD Geology Is in My Blood Albert L. Lamarre, CPG-06798
Lawrence River in Quebec, and in 1886 at age 17 he moved to northern New Hampshire where he mined clay for brickmak- ing over a period of about 25 years.
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The brickyard was located in a corner of Bath adjacent to the north-south-trending Connecticut River Valley. At its northern end, the Connecticut River is the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, and the river extends south- ward to empty into Long Island Sound. During the Ice Age the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered all of Canada and parts of the northern United States. When the ice sheet started melting and began its final retreat around 15,000 years ago, glacial meltwaters dumped large volumes of sand and gravel at its southern extent in central Connecticut, thus creating a terminal moraine that served as a dam. As the glacier continued to retreat north through New England, meltwater became trapped behind this sediment dam, forming Glacial Lake Hitchcock. Over the course of about 4,000 years, the lake gradually extended up the Connecticut River drainage as far north as northern New Hampshire and Vermont, a distance of about 200 miles and was as much as 20 miles wide. The lake was named in honor of the influential 19th century geologist Edward Hitchcock from Amherst College. The lake is often referred to as New England’s Greatest Glacial Lake.
Glacial Lake Hitchcock deposited annual layers of sedi- ments, called varves - silt and sand in the summertime (due to glacial meltwater) and clay in the wintertime (as the lake froze). In the historical past the clay-rich portions of the varved
eology must be in my blood. That’s because my great-grandfather owned and oper- ated a brickyard in Bath, New Hampshire, the town in which I grew up. And what did he make the bricks from – from clay contained in glacial varves depos- ited in Glacial Lake Hitchcock. Eustache Lamarre was born in 1869 near the St.
Eustache Lamarre family and workers, early 1900s.
lake deposits were mined from clay pits by European and Canadian settlers who mixed the clay with a small amount of sand as a binder, shaped it into bricks in wooden forms, and set them out to dry. After partial drying, the bricks were fired in a kiln and used to make the traditional red bricks still seen today in many of the historic buildings in the Connecticut River Valley. This became an important early industry in New England, and my great-grandfather was one of those industri- alists. He employed up to 25 workers at his brickworks, mostly French-Canadians, and his bricks were shipped as far away as Massachusetts. The brickyard closed in 1922.
Fascinating to me is the fact that the Lamarre Brickyard was one of the areas that geologist Robert W. Sayles studied as a professor at Harvard! He visited the brickyard many times and in 1919 his study of glacial deposits was published under the title, “Seasonal Deposition in Aqueoglacial Sediments.”
Sayles presented evidence from the Lamarre Brickyard and other places along the Connecticut River that the gla- cial varves represented yearly deposition of sediment, with a coarser-grained summer contribution and a finer-grained winter component. By counting the number of varves, one can determine how long the glacial lake existed. In 1919, not everyone accepted this as fact. So in my book the Lamarre Brickyard is famous for contributing to the science of glacial geology!
An example of a brick from the Lamarre Brickyard, at least 100 years old.
www.aipg.org
Even though Eustache Lamarre’s brick yard was long gone when I arrived, I passed by its location many times on my way to high school. That school building was built of bricks made at the Lamarre Brickyard. So the geology in the bricks must have permeated me.
Oct.Nov.Dec 2021 • TPG 47
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