The important, widespread, and non-perishable building material of tidewater was brick; and when we take up the subject of seventeenth-century brickwork, we may still with justification hover about the ruins of "William Sherwood's House" at Jamestown as a starting point. It was there were found the largest and most varied collection of rubbed or gauged brick in that capital city. By "gauging"--and we have mentioned the term before in describing certain church doorways,--we mean that the bricks have been cut and finished off by rubbing upon a sandstone. In England by 1660, only about seventeen years before Mr. Sherwood's home was erected, gauged bricks had become widely popular. Such bricks were usually lighter in color than the run-of-the-mill bricks, and were employed on cornices, belt or string courses, quoins at the corners of buildings, and the heads and jambs of openings. They dressed up an edifice in the eye of the seventeenth-century beholder. Further, we know that in Britain one of the ways of decorating an opening in a late medieval building was to put mouldings on jambs and head of a doorway or of a window. Apropos of Sherwood's at Jamestown, few of us, if any, know that his mansion possessed openings with _ovolo_ bricks--bricks rubbed and cut in an egg-shaped ornamental moulding. [Illustration: Part of a Medieval Ornamental Ovolo Jamb Brick from Sherwood's H. Jamestown] There seems little doubt that Virginians made bricks, even gauged bricks, in their capital and did not bring them from England--popular tradition to the contrary. Several brick kilns have been discovered at Jamestown by the National Park Service. One was a well-preserved, square brick kiln of about 1650, found with arched ovens and with some bricks and tiles in place. The citizens of James City had no difficulty in fabricating all the fancy and ornamental bricks or tiles which they desired. Virginia brick of the seventeenth century was generally called English brick or English _statute_ brick, not because it was brought from England--which it was not--but because its size was regulated by English law. There was another kind of brick used at that time in Virginia, the Dutch brick, made not by Hollanders but by Virginians and English, which was a great deal smaller than the English brick. The Jamestown English brick generally run 9" by 4-1/4" by 2-1/4" in size, but the Dutch brick, yellow in color, average 6" by 2-1/2" by 1-1/2".