How South Jersey became America’s capital of ‘patterned brick’ architecture

For years, author Robert L. Thompson heard fellow historians rave about the jazzy exterior wall designs of South Jersey’s 18th-century patterned brick farmhouses.

These geometric arrangements of structural bricks in contrasting colors, typically found on a single side of a house, “are really beautiful,” said Thompson.

“But nobody was asking why at least 107 of these houses were built by Quaker farmers in Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, and Salem Counties — more than anywhere else in the country,” he said.

The product of five years of research, Thompson’s Patterned Brick Architecture of West New Jersey was published in 2023 by the South Jersey Culture & History Center at Stockton University.

Thompson and others hope next year’s Philadelphia-focused celebration of the 250th anniversary, or Semiquincentennial, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence will heighten public interest in Revolutionary War buildings in South Jersey, including those made of patterned brick.

“One of the problems these buildings have is that people just take them for granted,” Thompson said.

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Thompson’s deeply researched book features photographs of about 40 patterned brick houses, most in the four South Jersey counties but also from Maryland and elsewhere.

Patterned brick “is an important architectural genre,” said the center’s assistant director, Paul W. Schopp, who edited the book.

“Quakers were generally thought of as quiet and not ostentatious,” he said. “But these houses shout with exuberance.”

Thompson and his wife, Pat, who grew up in a Quaker family, drove all over rural New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky to document and photograph the structures.

They found houses whose owners invited them inside and houses in ruins, along with barking dogs, wary neighbors, and occasional questions from curious police officers.

“There was a house in Louisiana we never could find,” said Pat, a retired nurse.

Most patterned brick houses were built in the early 1700s by Quaker farmers affluent enough to commission skilled laborers to make the bricks on site and build intricate, often zigzag displays into an exterior wall.

Some of the designs resemble textile weaving. They usually include the initials of the married couples who owned the property and the date of construction.

“A husband and wife together were building a home for their family that would last for generations,” said the author, whose book also notes that enslaved Africans were among the residents of some of the homes.

As for the geographic concentration of patterned brick in South Jersey, “there’s no simple answer,” he said.

The book does suggest that the great fire of London in 1666, the geology of New Jersey, and the economic circumstances of Quakers who settled in South Jersey created a mix of conditions that gave rise to the distinctive and enduring patterned brick architecture.

A great band of readily accessible clay, excellent for brickmaking, runs along the western flank of New Jersey, including Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem Counties. Deposits of sand and limestone, the raw materials of mortar, also are abundant in the region.

After London’s great fire led to regulations requiring dwellings to be constructed of brick or stone, large numbers of often newly trained brickmakers and bricklayers rebuilt the city.

By the late 17th century, that task was substantially complete, and some of these skilled workers emigrated to America, settling in South Jersey, Thompson said.

“The building trades struck me as the key” to why patterned brick houses became popular in South Jersey, he said. Before then, most residential construction involved wood, and techniques tended to be rudimentary.

The tradesmen and their Quaker clients “were the first to move beyond pioneering conditions, suggesting the colony was going to be permanent, and have a future in which great buildings were going to be possible,” said Bob Craig, owner of Advanced Old Building Research in Mercer County and author of a research paper on patterned brick houses.

In the Hancocks Bridge section of Lower Alloways Creek Township, Salem County, stands the stately patterned brick home built by William and Sarah Hancock in 1734.

Annually, several thousand people visit the property, which has been owned by the State of New Jersey since 1931, said William P. Michel, an interpretive specialist with the state park service.

While some visitors are eager to see the patterned brick wall at the house, others are drawn by the massacre of its inhabitants by British soldiers on March 21, 1778. Ten people, including the Hancocks’ son, were killed.

“The patterning definitely helps, but most of the time people come here for the story about the massacre,” said Michel.

“New Jersey is the crossroads of the American Revolution,” said the historian Matthew Skic, director of a personal project he calls Written With Bricks.

He’s creating an analog and digital visitor guide and road map to the South Jersey houses, as well as Quaker meetinghouses that also have the distinctive brick design.

Some of these structures “witnessed or were sites of important [Revolutionary] wartime events,” said Skic, senior curator at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

Craig hopes for more than appreciation.

“These buildings are at risk, and people need to step forward to preserve and rehabilitate them,” he said. “I’d like to see more of them protected by listing in historic building registers and by local ordinances.”