How did a Roman brick from the British Isles get to Washington
state's Fort Vancouver? Fort Vancouver Historical National
Historic Site At some moment a few years after Jesus Christ died
but before the second century began, someone made a brick on the
island that would become the cornerstone of Great Britain. The
area was controlled by Rome then, and known as Britannia and as
the brick lay green, awaiting the kiln, a cat walked across the
wet clay and left its footprints before wandering off to do
something else. The clay was fired, the prints fixed, and the
brick itself presumably became a piece of a building or road.
Two thousand years later, a Sonoma State master's student named
Kristin Converse was poking around the holdings of the Fort
Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state. She was
writing her thesis on the business and technology of brickmaking
in Portlandia (known more formally as the Willamette Valley). A
brick caught her eye. It was part of an odd group that was not
of local origin. In