AS family legacies go, there aren’t many that are built onquite so literally solid foundations as those of Glen Innes local Cathy Donald.

With family ties that reach well back into the 18th century and across the pond to Kent, a snapshot of Australia’s colonial and industrial heritage is firmly bound up in the blue-tinged brickwork that constitutes the foundations of the local hospital as well as numerous other structures, all sourced, formed and fired from raw local materials under the establishing guidance of Crimean War veteran John Falconer Willis.

Catching up with Cathy at the Glen Innes Bowling Club recently, the Examiner was privy to an insider’s glance at a prominent local industry that quite literally had a hand in building the community from as early as 1872 and has been producing reliable and hardy building materials from locally-sourced clay ever since.

Established in the late 19th century by Cathy’s great grandfather, the Glen Innes brickworks was originally located at Bell Rock near Blacks Road before it relocated to Thomas Street under the management of Willis’ son and Cathy’s grandfather Archibald Bickham Willis.

 Built on the back of an abundance of high quality local clay, the brickworks found steady feet and a rapidly-growing industry throughout the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with John Willis claiming to deliver an impressive 500,000 bricks “on the shortest reasonable notice at lowest market rates” as early as 1882.

By 1886 Willis was advertising 30,000 to be delivered in a fortnight, with prices plummeting to as low as 45 shillings per thousand.

Looking back, Cathy told the Examiner it was a fast-paced and unrelenting industry with her childhood and household schedule often running to the regular lunch whistle at the nearby brickworks.

“The whistle would blow at lunch and they would all come in covered in brick dust,” she said.

“It was a lovely old place.”

Not without its fair share of controversy, a misguided rumour that an R Child supplied the bricks for the construction of new police barracks and government works in Glen Innes in 1877 prompted the elder Willis to go to considerable lengths, posting a notice of dispute in the then-fledgling local Examiner and going so far as to deposit a sample of his fine local bricks at the Examiner office for open public inspection.

“All who have occasion to use my bricks have spoken of them as being excellent,” he wrote in the January 10 edition, 1877.

“The work turned out by me will compare favourably with any in New South Wales and my pug mill has no superior.”

With Willis bricks constituting numerous cornerstone structures across Glen Innes including the Glen Innes and District Services Club, Bowling Club, Presbyterian Manse and Hall as well as having a hand in

St Joseph’s Primary School and Glen Innes High School, it can be safely said that the Willis family legacy is built on the proverbial solid foundations.