Two weeks ago, part of an old brick structure which once housed a five-and-dime store on Wellsville’s Main Street collapsed onto an accountant’s office next door. When I read the news my soul ached with desire.

I want those bricks. All of them.

Loyal readers of this column know that the 1,500-foot driveway to my house is paved with bricks, nearly all obtained free from local demolition sites; “free” if you don’t count the cost of my time, labor, and gas for the pickup truck.

Why shouldn’t Wellsville’s five-and-dime bricks find an honored place in my road amongst those from so many other once-proud area buildings? This is America, where all used bricks have value, whether they be of humble yellow clay like East Liverpool’s Orlando’s Pizza and Booth Used Tires buildings or the pricey red bricks which once formed the walls of Midland’s First National Bank with polished blue marble trim. There was money in these towns once.

It just so happens that I’ve been working on my driveway this spring and could use some of those five-and-dime bricks. I even had to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” as they say, taking up bricks from the driveway to finish my renovation to the brick-paved traffic circle in front of our house.

Fortunately I have other bricks to replace them, big ladle bricks which once paved the parking lot of the defunct Sunset Video on Route 30. Somebody at the top of Chester Hill loved them because they still pave a large parking area around nearby Shorty’s Bar. They are part of my long-term plan (long-term in this context meaning if I live and can still work) to replace as many house bricks as possible with the large, heavy ladle bricks, which are less inclined to migrate from where they were put.

I paid Frank Six a modest hauling fee to bring me three tandem dump truck loads of Sunset Video ladle bricks which otherwise would have gone into a landfill. Recycling old bricks is not only good for the environment, it’s frugal and practical. Think of bricks as modular paving units which can be taken up, repositioned and reused ad infinitum. Long after the Apocalypse, when concrete and asphalt roads have crumbled, properly fired bricks will be dug up and used for building and barter by the wary, buckskin-clad survivors.

For years I thought the three-by-six-by-eight-inch yellow clay bricks which lately paved Sunset Video were made for paving. Not so. A friend better educated in area brick lore told me they were made for steel mills, their curved ends allowing them to circle the inside of ladles carrying molten steel. The local steel industry, you may have noticed, is mostly gone. Uncounted tens of thousands of ladle bricks were sold cheap and made many good driveways.

House bricks are four inches wide, eight long and two high, and generally unglazed. The bricks made expressly for paving, and used so extensively in East Liverpool and other American cities after 1870, however, are four wide and eight long but four inches high, making them twice the size of a house brick. Moreover, street pavers are vitrified, that is, fired at a high temperature so that the surface clay melted and fused like glass. I have used as many of these street pavers in my driveway as I could lay my hands on. Most of mine are marked “Vulcan,” which I believe means they were made by a company of that name in Wellsville. Millions of bricks were made and shipped by the trainload and boatload from the brickyards along this stretch of the Ohio River. New Cumberland earned the nickname of Brickyard Bend because of its numerous brick kilns. Which brickyards made vitrified pavers I would like to know.

People who cautiously travel up our long driveway for the first time often express their astonishment. “Did you lay all those bricks?” they, men mostly, ask. I tell them it is regarded in some circles as the eighth engineering wonder of the world, though I don’t say which circles. I tried counting bricks once, estimating 60,000 in the driveway and another 30,000 around the circle and garage.

Back to the five-and-dime.

The public and those in authority at Wellsville appear to agree that the 1905 building is a hazard and ought to be demolished, but the village doesn’t have the money and the owner in Michigan reportedly hung up when Mayor Bob Boley called. We only know this detail due to the fine reporting of Kristi R. Garabrandt, staff writer for The Review. Thank you, Kristi. Shame on absentee owners who shirk responsibility.

Kristi also clarified that there are two halves to this multi-story building, with the other half in local ownership.

Youngstown’s WKBN-TV blurb on Wellsville’s problem (news was slow up in Youngstown that day) quoted Mayor Boley as remembering when that five-and-dime store “had everything that you could buy in there, even a minor bird to talk.” Shame, shame on the writer. The bird that talks is a “myna.”

It’s also a shame that accountant Allen Owens had to vacate his office next door during the height of tax season because of the danger. He’s 69, and said this may drive him out of business. I understand. My wife Honey does taxes for family and friends, and she freaks out when the printer’s on the fritz.

To be honest, I don’t really care who owns the building or who pays for tearing it down. I just want the bricks.