Oddities I Fancy

Next time you’re walking past Savannah’s Colonial Park Cemetery on the Abercorn Street sidewalk, look down! Those unique, geometrically patterned bricks under your feet have a pretty neat backstory.These are Fitzgerald bricks, manufactured in Durham, NC, by Richard Fitzgerald—a free-born Black entrepreneur who built an industrial empire after the Civil War. His brickyards mechanized production to output 30,000 bricks a day, making him Durham’s first Black millionaire. You can find these bricks in many southeast coastal cities- to include Charleston and St. Augustine, too!

Sometimes I pass ghost tours telling their guests the pattern is intentional to keep witches and evil spirits away from the cemetery, but the pattern is just Fitzgerals's signature. The grooves were actually an engineering feat at the time simply designed for traction.