Laying down history

Albert Wilson, a burly man with a walrus mustache, pounds a brick into the ground with a heavy mallet.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The 57-year-old is replacing a concrete sidewalk on Second Street in the Garland Hill Historic District. He kneels in the dirt, wearing a hardhat and kneepads over mud-stained jeans.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Brick by brick, the sidewalk grows longer. The bricks were salvaged from Fifth Street, where the new roundabout will go. For decades, they were buried under 18 inches of asphalt.

“We went in through the rubble and reclaimed the bricks,” said Wilson, an employee at Counts & Dobyns who has worked on city restoration projects since 2003.

For 20 years, the Lynchburg native was a mechanical engineer. His work involved things like subatomic particles and million-pound magnets.

One day, he up and quit his job.

“I got burnt out. I was just a regular guy in the midst of some true geniuses.”

Wilson took the first job he found, which happened to be a brick mason’s laborer. Soon after, he was hired by Counts & Dobyns and moved back to Lynchburg.
His first project was to lay the brick sidewalk on Main Street, between 12th and 15th streets, which lines The White Hart Café and a string of antique shops and used furniture stores.

“Fifteen thousand bricks, and I laid every one of them,” he says.

In recent months, Wilson has become something of an amateur archaeologist. He is fascinated with the handmade bricks excavated from historic neighborhoods and is researching their origins.

“I set out to find out where all the bricks were manufactured. In the process, I thought it would be nice to know the evolution of the streets, from dirt to asphalt.”

He is still in the research stage, but hopes eventually to write an essay or to compose a timeline of his findings.

Now, when Wilson looks at Lynchburg’s streetscape, he sees the work of the countless men who toiled to lay the city’s streets and sidewalks. In the old days, there were no power tools, just hammer and chisel, horse and mule.

“They created something beautiful,” he says.

Wilson strolls down a brick-laden block of Madison Street, pointing out his handiwork and the work of men long gone. He used to walk these streets as a kid, in what he jokingly calls his “juvenile delinquent days.” Back then, the road was asphalt.

Wilson admires the craftsmanship with almost a childlike wonder. He points to a smooth stone that forms the corner of a curb.

“See that smooth curve? How did it get like that?” he says.

Then he points to a large, square stone on the sidewalk.

“Underneath that pretty surface, it’s complicated and rough.”

Some parts of the street and sidewalk are cracked or uneven. Utilities work and general wear and tear have damaged the roads over the years.

“It’s a pretty exciting thing,” he says, “to keep history alive.”