The Boys Scouts of America installed concrete road markers along the Lincoln Highway in 1928.Įxtensive construction in concrete also occurred through the system of coastal fortifications commissioned by the federal government in the 1890s for the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts. The Lincoln Highway Association promoted construction of a high quality continuous hard surface roadway across the country. The town of Seguin, Texas, thirty-five miles east of San Antonio, already had a number of concrete buildings by the 1850s and came to be called “The Mother of Concrete Cities,” with approximately ninety concrete buildings made from local “lime water” and gravel (Figure 1).įigure 3.
Fowler’s A Home for All (1853) which described the advantages of “gravel wall” construction to a wide audience. The use of concrete in residential construction was publicized in the second edition of Orson S. The natural hydraulic cement used in the canal construction was processed from a deposit of limestone found in 1818 near Chittenango, southeast of Syracuse. The Erie Canal in New York is an example of the early use of concrete in transportation in the United States. It was more readily accepted for use in transportation and infrastructure systems.
In the United States, concrete was slow in achieving widespread acceptance in building construction and did not begin to gain popularity until the late nineteenth century. The early history of concrete was fragmented, with developments in materials and construction techniques occurring on different continents and in various countries. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. By 1900, the town had approximately ninety limecrete structures, twenty of which remain. Lime concrete or "limecrete" was a popular construction material, as it could be made inexpensively from local materials. The Sebastopol House in Seguin, Texas, is an 1856 Greek Revival-style house constructed of lime concrete. Tabby was later used by the English settlers in the coastal southeastern United States.įigure 1. The Spanish introduced a form of concrete to the New World in the first decades of the sixteenth century, referred to as “tapia” or “tabby.” This material, a mixture of lime, sand, and shell or stone aggregate mixed with water, was placed between wooden forms, tamped, and allowed to dry in successive layers. Concrete technology was kept alive during the Middle Ages in Spain and Africa.
The resulting hydraulic cement became a major feature of Roman building practice, and was used in many buildings and engineering projects such as bridges and aqueducts. The ancient Romans found that a mixture of lime putty and pozzolana, a fine volcanic ash, would harden under water. In the context of this Brief, historic concrete is considered to be concrete used in construction of structures of historical, architectural, or engineering interest, whether those structures are old or relatively new.īrief History of Use and Manufacture return to top ▲ This Brief provides an overview of the history of concrete and its popularization in the United States, surveys the principal causes and modes of concrete deterioration, and outlines approaches to repair and protection that are appropriate to historic concrete. While early twentieth century proponents of modern concrete often considered it to be permanent, it is, like all materials, subject to deterioration. The use of reinforcement contributes significantly to the range and size of building and structure types that can be constructed with concrete. Inserting reinforcement adds tensile strength to structural concrete elements. Composed of a mixture of sand, gravel, crushed stone, or other coarse material, bound together with lime or cement, concrete undergoes a chemical reaction and hardens when water is added. Introduction to Historic Concrete return to top ▲Ĭoncrete is an extraordinarily versatile building material used for utilitarian, ornamental, and monumental structures since ancient times.