When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #29

Story #29 - Adobes – stomping the mud and straw – ouch!

Do you know what adobes are or what they are made of? They are mud bricks baked dry in the sun.

The house I grew up in originally had two rooms. New Mexico used to belong to Mexico and then on January 6, 1912 New Mexico gained its statehood and became part of the United States. My parents bought this little house with 4 acres of land. The house was adobe and stucco. You have to cover the adobe or the rain will wash them away. There was a front door on the one side and the other room had the door in the back. There were two separate families that used to live in that little house. The second room that had the door in the back of the house had a root cellar about five feet deep and five feet square beneath the wooden floor. When the Indians would come down and make raids on the town, the two families would go to the 2nd room and hide in the root cellar until the Indians were gone. Well, the Indians were put on a reservation and were not allowed to attack anymore.

When my parents bought the house and property my dad filled in the root cellar and he also made a doorway into the second room so that there were now two rooms. He built 7 more rooms onto the two-room house. Most of the rooms he added were made with homemade adobes. Guess who made those adobes? My dad and his kids, us! He made a trough with a wood frame and covered it with sheet metal. He nailed the sheet metal to the frame. I guess you could say it looked like a wide boat or raft with sides. He would throw dirt and water and some small size gravel in and make mud. Our dirt had clay in it so it made good adobe bricks. Then my brothers and I got in that trough of mud and my dad added the straw and we stomped it into the mud. Sometimes the straw would be poking up straight and when we stomped on it, it would stab into our feet and that would hurt! Dried out straw in short lengths could poke pretty good! After we were done stomping the straw into the mud we would get out and hose off our feet and legs to get clean. Our feet would get dried out and sometime crack and that would hurt and sometimes bleed. This usually happened only when we did a lot of mud stomping.

My dad made a brick form out of two by four lumber. The form looked like a double window frame. The adobes are about 10x14x4-inches in size. He would shovel the mud into the frames and pack them down with a shovel. He had several frames. He would let them sit for about half an hour and then take the frames off and let the bricks dry in the sun. If he got busy and left them in the frame until the next day they were harder to get out and then the adobes would sometimes break. You have to get them out of the frame while they’re damp.

How to Make Adobe Bricks (I got this off the internet-it explains the steps pretty easy.)
1-Shovel your soil into the mixing place you prepared. Add sand or clay if necessary.
2-Add water to the soil. Basically you are making mud. You want it to be firm and to hold its shape and not be too watery.
3-Mix the adobe thoroughly. Use a shovel or hoe or take your shoes off and stomp on it.
4-Take adobe with your shovel or hand and put it in the brick forms. Fill in the corners and press it down so it’s all filled. Smooth it off with the shovel, by hand or with a piece of wood.
5-Let the bricks dry in the forms for at least 20 minutes.
6-Remove the forms and let the bricks sit flat as they are for about three days.
7-Place the bricks on their edges.
8-Allow the bricks to dry thoroughly. This can take a week or more depending on the weather and soil.
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It was important to be sure to allow the adobes to dry. My dad would lean them two together like a tent. This way the air circulated between the bricks. It didn’t take more than a week to have them thoroughly dry. We lived in southern New Mexico and it was hot and dry. When it came time to use the adobe bricks he would use mud to lay the adobes. When he finished a wall he would cover the wall with chicken wire and nail it into the adobes. Then he would mix concrete and then apply it over the wire and make a nice stucco finish. The wire helped to keep the stucco on the adobe. Then he would paint over the stucco. Adobe was a good insulator. It helped to keep the house cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. But if it got real hot outside, the house would get warm.

That was our childhood adventure with mud, adobe and building with the adobe bricks. It made it much more affordable to build a home out of adobe.