The Brick They Almost Threw Away

In 2014, a demolition crew in downtown Savannah, Georgia, was tearing down a condemned cotton warehouse when foreman Marcus Delaine noticed something odd. Buried beneath crumbling plaster, he found rows of original 1850s Savannah gray bricks — a building material so rare that preservationists had spent years searching for surviving examples. The contractor had already scheduled a dumpster. Those bricks were hours from a landfill.…