Take a Closer Look at the Foundation of Oakland: Bricks (Part 3)
By Ashley Shares, Director of Preservation
Whether or not you’ve visited Oakland, you’ve certainly encountered Chattahoochee Bricks. Not only were many pathways and gutters at the cemetery built from bricks bought from the Chattahoochee Brick company, but if there was a public works project in Atlanta at the turn of the century that needed bricks, chances are, that’s where they came from.
A map of the Palmer Brick Company
James English, president of the company during its most prolific years, kept prices extremely low, outproducing and outbidding every competitor in the area. He did so through the convict leasing system which allowed companies to rent incarcerated laborers from the state. Forced to work and live in cruel, unsanitary, and dangerous conditions, driven to exhaustion and sometimes death, men—mostly poor and black, hand-made hundreds of thousands of bricks each day until the practice was outlawed in 1908.
Chattahoochee Brick Company’s plant was built at the junction of Proctor Creek and the Chattahoochee River, near present-day Whittier Mill Park. The location allowed laborers to pull rich alluvial clay from both sources. James English also owned and operated Palmer Brick Company, located on Marietta Street, adjacent the Exposition Cotton Mills. Chattahoochee River clay is composed of weathered Mica Schist, a foliated, shiny metamorphic rock prevalent in Georgia. Later down the road, clay from the South River and Nickajack Creek was also used. Early in its history, bricks at Chattahoochee Brick were made by hand, and can easily be recognized by the distinctive fingerprints pressed into them.
Convict leasing in Georgia began in 1866, immediately following the end of the Civil War, in part because the State Penitentiary had been burned down by General Sherman in 1864. It worked by allowing companies to band together into Penitentiary Companies and collectively enter into a lease agreement with the prison system, giving them cheap labor and eliminating the need to rebuild the physical prison. Most of the convicts were black men, arrested and incarcerated for minor offenses such as “vagrancy” under the new Black Codes. James English was a majority shareholder in multiple Penitentiary Companies and used convicts in both Palmer and Chattahoochee Brick starting in 1885. He was also, conveniently, the Police Commissioner for much of the time he was also in control of up to 42% of the state’s convict population. Corruption in local governments was, unfortunately, not hard to find, and this was another, particularly harmful example of it.
Soon after the practice began, relatives of the convicts themselves, “free labor” company owners, politicians, and journalists called attention to the abhorrent conditions at Georgia’s convict labor camps. Although some reports noted acceptable conditions at the Palmer facility, the Chattahoochee plant was particularly inhumane: moldy and poorly prepared food, unwashed clothing, dirty bedding, and whippings for not keeping up the pace of production, no matter the conditions. In the kilns, temperatures were so hot that guards would not carry firearms for fear the heat would make them explode. Many convicts died at the Chattahoochee plant, and it is not known where they are buried. Maps of the site include a cemetery, but modern ground-penetrating radar has failed to corroborate this.
Because the system produced cheap materials at a time when Georgia was struggling to recover from the Civil War, and because the men who managed and owned the companies utilizing convict labor were powerful and well-connected, it took until the 1908 Felder Investigation Committee hearings for convict leasing to be discontinued in Georgia. Led by Senator Thomas S. Felder, the committee conducted site visits and listened to testimony from Chattahoochee Brick employees. Some of the worst abuse seemed to surround a warden named James Casey:
Dr. Green at the camp examined Peter Harris’ body and observed 25-39 lashes by Captain Casey. He was whipped twice that day, once when he was put to work at 7 in the morning and again after he had given out at work about 4 o’clock that afternoon. I found the negro with flies in his mouth and his pulse nearly stopped. I told them he was dying and they didn’t credit it. He was taken into the hospital and I had several men help revive him. The negro died in about ten minutes. Casey went off on his horse and stayed late that night.
The Felder investigation blew the lid off the whole practice of Convict Leasing. However, neither James English nor any of the wardens and overseers were ever charged in relation to the atrocities that occurred at Chattahoochee Brick, despite damning evidence presented during the hearings. Instead, Chattahoochee Brick continued to operate under the control of the English Family, albeit on a smaller scale, until the 1970s when the company was bought by General Shale. English begrudgingly made the switch to free labor in 1909, which immediately affected his bottom line, not only because he had to actually pay his employees, but for the first time, he also had to build company housing since the brickyard was too far from the city for workers to walk. He also had to take out liability insurance! By 1912, he was forced to sell the Palmer Brick Company as well as the family mansion on Peachtree.
The conclusion of the convict leasing era in 1908 ended James English’s monopoly on brick making in Atlanta, making way for other companies to flourish. Many of these other bricks can be found in Oakland’s pathways. Still, the legacy of Convict Leasing and Chattahoochee Brick is inextricable from the cemetery’s history. Hundreds of thousands of bricks bear the fingerprints of abused, exhausted prisoners forced to partake in a corrupt and exploitative system that cannot be described as anything but slavery. So next time you visit, I encourage you to look down at what’s under your feet and reflect upon the story that the bricks tell.
