People often overlook the difficulty of creating buildings before the Civil War. Modern luxuries help us overlook the amount of work and skill that went into becoming brickmasons or builders. Studying Old Salem’s brick buildings gave us an opportunity to slow down and think about the people who actually produced their parts and then constructed them, including a number of people who were enslaved.

To learn more please explore students' research: an account of the slave labor that literally built Old Salem.