On May 9th, 2011 I had to drive from Champaign, IL to St. Louis. I decided to take the long way to my destination and visit the towns of my ancestor, Lawrence Zerr, in Shelby County, IL.
Lawrence was the father of one of my great grandfathers, E. M. Zerr. Stories are told in the town history books of Strasburg, IL that Lawrence Zerr, as a 17 year old boy, entered a partnership with William Telgmann and began a brick kiln in 1867. Other stories refer to Stewardson, IL, five miles south of Strasburg along State Rt. 32, as the site of a later kiln, in the center of the village where now stands a Prairie National Bank building. Strasburg was only laid out as a town in 1874 (by Charles Ostermeier), and no maps are published before that time, so the precise location for that first brickyard is a bit tenuous.
Several brick buildings and houses are still standing in the centers of Strasburg and Stewardson. Around this time the first post office of Strasburg was established with Lawrence Zerr appointed as the postmaster (he was already a village trustee by the late 1870s). His term ended in 1883 when a new President was elected in the national election. In addition to running a brick operation and acting as postmaster, Lawrence also obtained a liquor license for 90 dollars a year in 1877 according to the published records of the town of Strasburg, IL. By 1900 Lawrence had convinced the town that it needed brick sidewalks, and guess who was going to supply the bricks?
My objective on this day of sight-seeing was to find some evidence of those brick sidewalks, see what brick buildings still stood from the time of Lawrence, and see what I could find that was left of the legacy of my ancestor. As you can see from these photos, plenty of his bricks remain even though the Zerr family had mostly left Shelby county by the time of Lawrence's death in 1935.
