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Baltimore's Camden Yards and Ravens Stadium blend as comfortably into their urban landscape as the older structures around them, but much of their exterior beauty comes from the rural countryside of western Maryland. The brick for the major league baseball and football stadiums was made at Redland Brick Inc.'s Cushwa Plant in Williamsport, Md.
Like most U.S. brick manufacturers, Redland's Cushwa plant is located near its raw materials: high grade clay with good ceramic properties and shale. Although shale is a sedimentary rock, it is formed from compressed mud and chemicals similar to clay so it is a common material for bricks..
The Cushwa plant has been producing bricks for over a century, and its 300 acres contain enough clay and shale for 100 more years. The brickyard was started in 1872 by Victor Cushwa and remained a family-owned business until 1987 when it was bought by a British company, Steetley PLC., which also owned two other American brick manufacturers, KF in Connecticut and Harmar, located near Pittsburgh.
In 1992, Steetley was acquired by Redland, PLC, another British company which at that time was the largest brick company in the world. The next year, all three American brick companies were consolidated into Redland Brick Inc. In 1996, Ohio-based Belden Brick Co. purchased Redland Brick Inc.
Today, Redland Brick Inc. has annual sales of $30 million and employs 240 people; 116 people work at the Cushwa plant. Redland's corporate office is in Williamsport, in a Williamsburg-style building built in 1973 of (what else!) brick. When a two-story addition was built last year, the new hand-moulded rose-colored bricks matched perfectly.
Redland Brick is one of over 100 American brick manufacturers. The U.S. has over 200 operational brick plants with an aggregate capacity of approximately nine billion standard brick equivalents. (Because of the varying sizes of bricks, capacity and production are measured in standard brick equivalents or SBEs, each measuring 7-5/8" x 3-5/8" x 2-1/4".)
Redland Brick Inc. has a annual capacity of 140 million SBEs: 57 million at the Cushwa plant, 54 million at the KF plant, and 29 million at the Harmar plant.
Approximately 90% of the bricks produced in the U. S. are extruded, 4 process in which stiff mud is forced through an...