Baking bricks becomes big business
If you could have been here 100 years ago, you would have been able to count more than 70 chimneys along the shores of the Flensburg Fjord. They were all part of huge industry ovens. Of course, no dough for bread was baked in these furnaces. It was… bricks! The bricks were made of clay, and it took 120,000 pieces to fill just one single oven. Bricks from Flensburg were a real trend: they were small, not so heavy, and easy to stack (by the way: Germans call them Backsteine – “baked stones”).
Everyone wanted them for their building projects. But they could not be manufactured just everywhere. You need an underground containing clay. Clay is a special kind of earth that was formed many thousand years ago. Around Flensburg, they found lots of clay. That's why the bricks from the banks of Flensburg Fjord were exported from here by ship as far as to the Caribbean Islands. With a bit of luck, you will still find red or yellow brick remnants on the beach even today. The brickworks had permission to dump bricks, which were broken during the “baking” process, on the beach.
Everyone wanted them for their building projects. But they could not be manufactured just everywhere. You need an underground containing clay. Clay is a special kind of earth that was formed many thousand years ago. Around Flensburg, they found lots of clay. That's why the bricks from the banks of Flensburg Fjord were exported from here by ship as far as to the Caribbean Islands. With a bit of luck, you will still find red or yellow brick remnants on the beach even today. The brickworks had permission to dump bricks, which were broken during the “baking” process, on the beach.