Why do so many small Kansas towns have brick streets?

[edwaleni]

^^^^

I looked at a modern map of Madison and tried to determine where the station might have stood.  I know one of the routes 66 took through Madison was up Broadway/Madison Ave.  Didn't see anything promising there.  A more modern route was up Edwardsville Road. Didn't see anything there either.

I realize this was 100 years ago but these things intrigue me. WIll have to keep digging.

The photo shows the intersection of Vandalia Road and Brown Street in Edwardsville.

The train station in the background was for the Litchfield & Madison Railroad. Interesting because the Chicago & Northwestern RR which controlled it, only show a station in Staunton IL. So this building must be where the crews in Edwardsville were based.

[apeman33]

If you think those towns have a lot of brick streets, you should visit Fort Scott, KS. The brick streets there are a point of pride for the community.

Too bad they were poorly maintained from about 1965 to about 2010. The brick streets are bumpy, have concrete patches or have been paved over because it was just easier than fixing it.

One horrid attempt at patching is near downtown where they poured red-colored concrete and stamped a brick pattern in it. It dried pink, you can see the crushed rocks and they poured too much so it rises slightly above the level of the rest of the road.

[US71]

If my memory serves correct, there are several towns along US 40 and US 24 that have short sections of brick streets.  Most have been paved over, but a few have such poor street maintenance, the bricks show through.

[bwana39]

Brick streets were a big deal back before WWI. Any sort of hard-stand street was. Kansas has them for two reasons. 1) They spent money building passable downtowns before large scale concrete or asphalt paving was feasible. 2) They didn't dig them up and replace them in the interim years.

In Texas MOST of the remaining brick streets were paved over with asphalt / asphaltic concrete in the fifties and sixties. When nostalgia made brick streets popular again, they milled the pavement down to the bricks and viola!  Milling also cured the biggest problem with brick (or as far as that goes wood cobble) streets: uneven choppy ride. They could be milled down to an even height and this seemed to work with bricks similar to how it works with more modern road materials.

As far as that goes, you can mill the expansion joint / plate shift joints and turn a fairly lumpy road into a smooth surface. The downside is every time you do this, it makes the top thinner and thinner. You can overlay the concrete or asphalt surfaces. With Bricks, it kinda defeats the purpose. That said, brick streets are not maintenance free. They break, chip, sink down, ride up. The very reason they were paved over still exists. 
I spent a spent a few days when I was in high school chipping mortar off of bricks from a torn-down building. The use for the bricks were replacements for the brick streets a couple of towns over.  I checked, it seems they dug them up and repaved the entire downtown with concrete.

[In_Correct]

Recently, I noticed something odd from Google Maps. Several small KS towns have minor and major streets laid in brick. These include Kingman, Harper, Pratt, and Augusta--and those are just the ones near Wichita. Why is this?

Because brick streets are beautiful.

[SD Mapman]

I spent a good deal of time in Atchison over the past few years, and the brick streets there were laid by a guy who lost both legs below the knee in a railroad accident (true story!). The major roads got paved over, but a good number of minor streets, especially in the Amelia Earhart Historic District are still brick. They're really slick in the winter!

[TheGrassGuy]

Trenton has brick streets. Not sure how many other towns in NJ do.

[Route66Fan]

Sturgeon Ave in Moberly, MO is also brick.

[Avalanchez71]

Add Oberlin, KS to the list.  It is pretty extensive there as well.