Over 100 years ago, the Main Library opened with a secret kept behind brick. Now 100 years later, it’s been revealed to the modern public: a time capsule!
And the only way in was through ‘caveman stuff’ as brickmason foreperson Eric Quinley said. F&S brickmasons wreck, tear, beat and saw their way through walls like these every day. But the impressive part is the ability to reconstruct what they just tore down.
History and Future
In November 2024, a time capsule was captured from behind the cornerstone at the Main Library to celebrate the building centennial. According to The Daily Illini, “humidity and condensation had damaged the contents.”
Wanting to make up for this, the Library does plan on inserting a new time capsule, to thy happy children of the future 100 years from now. When the new one goes in, F&S brickmasons will close up the hole and a century in the future, a new generation of masons will open that same wall up. They’ll likely perform the same work with similar tools, skills, and perseverance as from 2024, or 1924.
“I’d still guess there’s gonna be a person out there with a trowel and jointer and tuck pointer and all that stuff. There are some machines that lay brick, but I saw a video the other day where they said it did the work of three men, but it took three men to man the machine.” Quinley said. “For the most part, I just like to think in the future that like they did 100 years ago, they’ll still lay brick by brick.”
It’s a regular activity for the brickmasons to rebuild what they just broke, as they must open up walls for all sorts of reasons, including for Grainger College of Engineering students to see what goes into the making of a building – and peering inside a 75- or 100-year old building can be enlightening the next generation of builders, planners, and architects. Luckily, the Library went under a pretty serious “facelift,” as Quinley said, just about 10 years ago when a lot of tuckpointing was done on the brick exterior.
“Bricks do age. These brick were in good shape. The brick themselves are different than modern brick, because they’re bigger,” Quinley noted. “Now we have a modular brick which is 7-5/8, those old brick are sometimes a full eight inches, sometimes 8-1/4, so when we tear open something like that, we try to save what we tear out because you can’t go get those big brick anywhere.”
“Anybody could wreck a hole in the wall,” Quinley said. “But we needed to try to salvage some of the brick, and take it out in such a way that we could rebuild it without it being obvious that it had been torn open.”
Services
Brickmasons install, maintain, and repair masonry fixtures of all types:
- Internal and external masonry walls
- Marble partitions in restroom stalls
- Tile and terrazzo floors
The materials used for project and service work include brick, cinderblock, concrete block pavers, stone, limestone, marble, granite, quarry tile, ceramic tile, clay tile, and terrazzo.