In our previous post on the topic of the stone arch culverts of Glencoe Township, Butler County, Kansas, we deduced that Harry Brickley was very likely the builder of two of the four culverts we found. In this post, we will look into who Harry Brickley was and then wrap up by making an educated guess about the builders of the remaining two culverts.
Harry Brickley
Harry Brickley was a builder from the Rosalia area. He worked on numerous projects with a masonry bent, such as foundations for churches and houses. He also built numerous stone arch “caves” a.k.a. storm shelters. He earned a reputation for quality work. Not only did he build several culverts in Glencoe Township, but we found he also received extensive payment from Rosalia Township over the years for “road work” and he certainly built at least one bridge north of Rosalia as well. It seems at least possible that more stone arch culverts may be found in the Rosalia area. If that is the case, than one would expect to find a similarity between some of them and the Glencoe culverts that we believe were also built by Harry Brickley.
The Other SE 80th Street Culvert
As noted in our previous post, there are some distinct similarities between a couple of the Glencoe Township stone culverts. In this post, we dealt with the 1905 SE 80th Street culvert referred to in an article that appeared in the Leon Indicator, and pointed out its similarities to the 1906 SE 90th Street stone culvert. Now we will discuss another culvert with extremely similar characteristics, also on SE 80th Street, for which we have no definite newspaper references.
A look at the photos above reveals the similarities between all three bridges. Unfortunately, the SE 80th Street culvert we can find nothing about in the newspaper is partially filled in, so we are unable to say if it was built with a ledge beneath the arch like the other two, which, as we showed in our previous post, was a distinct characteristic of these bridges. Be that as it may, based on the style of masonry we suspect this nearly buried culvert on SE 80th Street was built by the same builder as the other two culverts shown in the gallery. Thus, it is likely also by Harry Brickley.
The Price Road Culvert
The stone culvert on Price Road on the Glencoe/Little Walnut township line is an enigma. Not only does it seem that it was built by a different mason than the other three culverts we found, but we have not been able to find anything definite about it in the newspapers. And not only is the masonry different, but the design is quite different from the other Glencoe stone culverts as well.
Rather than being a simple Roman arch begun at the streambed, the arch on this culvert is a segmental arch started from well-cut skewbacks and is raised up above the streambed on short abutments. Of course, the streambed could have deepened over the years, though this degree of lowering without damage to the bridge seems an unlikely occurrence. Furthermore, this would not account for the different style of arch the Price Road culvert uses as compared to the other Glencoe culverts. The culvert was either repaired or widened one side, so it is hard to determine what its original width was, though it seems like the roadway of the original structure may have been a little narrow. The basic designs for the stone culverts were usually determined by the township (see the call for bids for the SE 90th Street culvert we reprinted in the first article of this series), so was this culvert built by Glencoe at all? As it is on the township line, it could just have easily been built by Little Walnut Township. This could account for the obviously different design used. If the culvert was built by Little Walnut Township, it may have been built by one of the Kisers of Leon; there were several Kisers who built culverts for Little Walnut Township, and at least some of these culverts built by the Kisers were stone.
To see the exact locations of these culverts, please see our Stone Arch Bridges of Butler County, Kansas page.
To see the previous post of this series, click here.
Stone Arch Bridges 