THE TIM BUNKER PAPERS. 69 



tile, which cost twelve dollars a thousand in Albany, about 

 double the first cost by the time they get where an East 

 ern farmer wants to use them. 



Hearing of the tile factory I went up to see it yester 

 day, and to have a talk with Standish about it. I found 

 the hint I dropped in half joke last spring had fallen into 

 good soil, and was bearing good fruit. He had got it 

 all ciphered out, as Seth Twiggs said. 



Said he, &quot; Esq. Bunker, I ve thought a heap on what 

 you said about turning my brick-yard into a tile fac 

 tory, and you see I ve partly done it. The only thing 

 that stumbled me was, whether I should have any market 

 for the tile after I got them made. I looked over my 

 farm, and found that I could use at least fifty thousand in 

 draining some swales, and if these worked well, I should 

 probably want more. I went round some into the neigh 

 boring towns, and found a good many who wanted to try 

 the experiment, and were willing to engage from one to 

 ten thousand apiece. I marketed a hundred thousand. 

 You see I had a plenty of bricks to make a kiln of for 

 burning, and this at the market price for bricks cost me 

 about a thousand dollars. The iron machine for moulding 

 tile that you see there, cost 150 dollars, and the drying- 

 house perhaps 800 more. So that any man who owns a 

 brick-yard with the usual fixtures for grinding clay, wants 

 about two thousand dollars capital to start the tile busi 

 ness with, on a small scale. I can burn sixteen thousand 

 tile in that kiln at once, and it takes about ten cords of 

 wood to do it. The actual cost of moulding, not count 

 ing the clay anything, or the interest of the money, is 

 about two dollars a thousand, and the burning, where wood 

 is four dollars a cord, should not be over five dollars. This 

 brings the actual cost of two-inch tiles not far from seven 

 dollars a thousand. If I can sell them at twelve dollars 

 a thousand, even though it costs me something to deliver 

 them at the river landing, I can make a handsome profit. 



