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Once considered trash, clinkers were one of several early 20th-century bricks whose nonconformity was part of their appeal.

We think of bricks as models of consistency, modular building units about 2 x 4 x 8 and relatively identical in color. By the early 1900s, though, the distorted shapes and intense hues of clinker bricks, the manufacturing accidents that had long been the bane of brick makers, became a boon to creative builders and architects who found visual energy and natural beauty in the bricks’ irregularity.

What Are Clinker Bricks?

Named for the distinctive sound they make when banged together, clinker bricks are the result of wet bricks placed too close to the fire. The intense heat created a hard, durable brick that often twisted into volcanic shapes and textures.  Over baking produced rich, warm colors as well that ran the gamut from reds, yellows, and oranges to deep, flash-burned browns, purples, and blacks.

 No two clinker bricks were alike, rendering them trash to brick manufacturers who prized uniformity; but they became treasure during the Arts & Crafts era when avant-garde home builders and architects started building houses with them precisely because they were so unusual.

Who made them?

From approximately 1906 to 1940 the Shaffer Brickyard (located where the stadium is today) made and sold them to home builders throughout Western Washington. The Shaffer family also built many homes in Glacier View.  Jerry Shaffer and his family live in a clinker house that was built by his great-grandfather on 45th & Hoyt Ave.  

Where can you find them?

You can find homes built of them throughout Everett and in Central Park alone I’ve counted eight built by the Shaffer’s. 

Scarce Resource

Clinkers are still available through a few salvage companies that reclaim and rescue bricks from demolition sites or discard piles.  When demand for clinkers increased John Gavin of Gavin Historical Bricks & Stone began manufacturing them using a painstaking process, which is somewhat ironic given that the originals were created by mistake.

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By 1900 most of Lowell, Pinehurst and our neighborhood had been logged, surveyed and platted.  There were many stump farms and homesteads with no electricity or running water.  Logger’s skid roads provided the only access to homesteads and transportation to the market was nonexistent.  When the Interurban electric railway came to Everett in 1910 it open the doors for transportation and it brought electricity along the route.  The Everett Golf & Country Club was also established in 1910 and they hoped to draw members and upscale home builders to the newly named Beverly Park Neighborhood that was named after the famous Beverly Tennis & Golf Club in Massachusetts. Real estate developers wasted no time in offering lots for sale to the public.  It was marketed as “progress” moving away from the frontier to civilization with electric power for all. Funny how things don’t change.

After 100 years, you may be wondering “Where is Central Park?”  The Everett School District Administration property, on Colby, is the southern boundary and 43rd Street is the north boundary. It encompasses Colby, Hoyt, Rucker, Maryland, Delaware and Carlton.  The plat map identifies a very small triangle park at the intersection of Rucker & 47th that never materialized.

In the Central Park neighborhood you’ll find a wide range of pre-WWII styles from eclectic revivals such as Mission and Tudor to Craftsman bungalow cottages. Many with original ornamentation details left intact; such as Clinker brick chimneys.  I recently met Susan and Daryl Presley who live on Hoyt and toured their 1932 Tudor Revival that they bought in 2004, which they have pristinely maintained and recently repainted in a deep earth green. Susan graduated from Cascade High School in 1979 and she has been a bankruptcy paralegal for more than 20 years. Daryl is originally from California and he works for the Everett Parks Dept. They spend as much time in their yard as the weather allows; and it shows. For all their hard work, they have won a Rejuvenation and Transformation Monte Cristo Award!

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