By the size of the bricks you cannot tell the age of an old house within fifty years.

February 22.

 

Dugan Desert

P. M. — To Dugan Desert. 

The Tommy Wheeler house, like the Hunt house, has the sills projecting inside. 

Its bricks are about the same size with those of the Lee chimney; they are eight and three quarters to nine inches long by four and a half, but not in clay. 

A part at least of the back side has bricks on their edges in clay, as at the Hunt house, and there are bricks in clay flat on the plate, close under roof at the eaves. 

I think that by the size of the bricks you cannot tell the age of an old house within fifty years.

H.  D. Thoreau, Journal, February 22, 1857

The Tommy Wheeler house. See December 28, 1851 ("Went into Tommy Wheeler's house, where still stands the spinning-wheel, and even the loom, home-made. Great pitch pine timbers overhead, fifteen or sixteen inches in diameter, telling of the primitive forest here.")

Its bricks are about the same size with those of the Lee chimney . . . See February 17, 1857 ("The bricks of the old [Lee]chimney which has the date on it vary from eight to eight and one half inches in length, but the oldest in the chimney in the rear part are nine to nine and one fourth long by four and one fourth plus wide and two and one fourth to two and one half thick. ")