Brick Streets & Roads

Drive Stanwood today and still bump over the brick streets.  Keeping up with Norwegian Stanwood was important.  East Stanwood hired a young contractor to lay its brick streets.  The entrepreneur finished the job quickly as was his forte.  He was Henry Kaiser who later built WW II liberty ships in Oakland, Portland, and Vancouver WA.  One of these, the Robert E. Peary, was built in 4 days.  Norse Stanwood, on the other hand, had long used bricks delivered as ballast in the bottoms of sailing ships from Brest, Shanghai, and other locations.  (Sailing ships, to stay low in the water and survive storms and winds, had to remain heavy.  They did so by putting ballast in their cargo holds.  When they picked up their “loads,” in this case, logs they would trade the ballast for the new weight of the timber.  Divers tell of Utsalady Bay off/of Camano Island having small pyramids or bricks sitting underwater today.  Small pyramids left behind of another time.

https://www.historylink.org/file/22578
http://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Swedish-Cabin.pdf
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm_Su9ZKvqc/

The young man, a general contractor, who was hired to rebrick old and rebrick new streets in the 1930s would later have an automobile named after himself, sold through the Sears & Roebuck catalog found in every house (and outhouse) in America.  The car was a:

Tesla
Edison
Kaiser

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