Meet Madeleine Bolton, Williamsburg’s Modern Brickworks

All year, the Meet Virginia series has profiled the lives of some of the more than eight million people who call Virginia home. This month, Virginia Public Radio’s Christine Kueter (CUE-ter) introduces us to someone whose modern work gives us a sense of what Virginia was like 250 years ago.

Madeleine Bolton’s fingerprints are all over Colonial Williamsburg. His fingerprints too.

That’s because Bolton, 26, who has completed a six-year apprenticeship in brickmaking and masonry for three years, is helping to make some of the tens of thousands of clay bricks used to restore, repair and build structures on the 300-acre historic site.

“The amount of clay is the pressure, you know, and stuff like that. I really like molding. I like trying to get it exactly right, trying to get it in perfectly, I think that’s kind of fun to do. Like, if they want to see how I’m doing it, I have to think in my head, ‘I have to go slower.’ What I want to do is go really fast, because it’s kind of fun to think, ‘Oooh, yeah. Put it in there, squish it,’ which is also what I think when I’m talking: ‘Slower. Don’t talk so fast,’” she says with a laugh.

But if she goes fast, Bolton can shape around 180 bricks an hour: she shapes a 5kg ball of wet clay before rolling it in fine sand and banging it into a wooden shape. From there, the still soft shapes are emptied onto a flat sand surface, covered with canvas and left to dry in the sun. In the fall, Bolton will help build and fuel a massive brick kiln and, over four or five days and nights, bake the batch of summer bricks at 900 degrees Celsius until crisp and purple-brown.

It’s satisfying, hot, monotonous work. Bolton leaves footprints and handprints from time to time, like a secret and collective prank of brickmakers. Look closely at Williamsburg’s original buildings and you can see Bolton’s 17th- and 18th-century counterparts: some free, but many enslaved.

“For us, like I said, we work eight hours a day, like, we can leave when the day is done,” she notes. “We go home and we think about the people who came before us, the enslaved workers, who historically were making all those bricks. They’re making them because tomorrow’s not going to be any different. Talk about the amount of work and the suffering that went into that. Because, of course, today, all of us in the brickyard are working for a wage. And they wouldn’t have been. Historically, the bricklayer might have been able to work his way up to some sort of merchant class. But the bricklayer works until he can’t work anymore. And all the people on that site, the enslaved workers, who were making all those bricks, that’s all they could know.”

Bolton’s original plan, to become an epidemiologist, was abandoned when COVID-19 struck his senior year at James Madison University.

“I was always kind of obsessed with it, even though I was a middle schooler, which is kind of scary in retrospect,” she says. “I was so interested and excited about learning about disease transmission and response and how we address these global issues. And then as I watched it wane, and I saw exactly how heavy it was becoming, it made me less and less excited about hitting that brick wall. I was thinking about other ways I could be useful.”

After graduating and spending a few months working, she landed the job in Williamsburg in 2021. She is one of about 30 apprentices there.

“It’s probably not something that young Madeleine would have imagined doing, but I really enjoy it now. I’m a very detail-oriented person, to a fault,” Bolton admits. “So it’s a good thing, because I’ve always liked to understand things to some degree. And this gives me a multitude of ways to do that.”

A good example of this is the brickmakers’ upcoming pug mill, a room-sized clay mixer with a vertical shaft that, when the wheelwright has finished it, will connect to a horse whose circles will move it. The pug mill also means that Bolton won’t have to spend as much time in the pit, cutting clay with her bare feet, as the brickmakers before her did in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And what’s more, you know, the horse.

“We have already given the horse a name. I’m very excited. Buckwheat. It’s a brickwork classic,” she says with a laugh.