Evansville Tuckpointing Indiana limestone and Ohio Valley brick: what your walls are made of
Two materials make up most of the older masonry in Evansville and the Tri-State: locally made brick and Indiana limestone. They fail in different ways and get repaired differently, and knowing which one you are looking at is the difference between a repair that lasts 50 years and one that costs you the brick.
Indiana limestone: the sills, caps, and trim
Nearly every brick house here from the 1880s through the 1950s has Indiana limestone in it, most often as window sills, door surrounds, water tables, porch steps, and chimney or parapet caps. The stone is Salem Limestone, deposited in the Mississippian period as marine sediment on the floor of a shallow inland sea, and quarried in south central Indiana between Bloomington and Bedford. The first quarry there opened in 1827, and by 1929 Indiana quarries were producing 12,000,000 cubic feet of usable stone a year. It went into the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, Grand Central Terminal, and roughly 35 of the 50 state capitols. It also went, by the trainload, into ordinary houses within a couple of hundred miles of the quarries, which is why it is standard equipment in Evansville.
How it fails here. Indiana limestone is largely calcium carbonate, and acid rain wears it relatively quickly. It is also porous enough to hold water, and a sill or a cap is the most exposed horizontal surface on any wall. Evansville then runs it through roughly 77 freeze-thaw cycles a winter, calculated from the 92.6 nights a year at or below 32 degrees against only 15.5 days that stay frozen in the 1991-2020 normals for Evansville Regional Airport, under 45.31 inches of annual precipitation. The result is a sugary, eroding top face, cracks across the middle of sills, and stones that have lost the slope and drip edge that made them shed water in the first place.
What that costs. Limestone sill repair or reset runs $300 to $1,200 each, and broader stone repair, including patching, Dutchman repairs, and repointing stonework, runs $15 to $40 per square foot. The cracked limestone sill page covers how to check the slope and the drip in ten minutes, and stone and limestone repair covers the repair itself.
What not to do. Do not caulk a cracked sill closed, because that traps water in the stone and in the wall below it. Do not seal or paint limestone, for the same reason. And do not let anyone sandblast it or the brick around it; the Indiana DNR’s guidance on historic brick identifies sandblasting and painting as the two treatments that do the most damage to old masonry, and on limestone abrasive cleaning opens the surface to faster weathering.
Ohio Valley brick: soft, local, and older than you think
Before the railroads made it cheap to ship heavy materials, brick was made close to where it was used, from clay dug nearby. The Ohio Valley has plenty of good clay, so Evansville, Henderson, Newburgh, and the river towns above and below them built in brick from the start. Vincennes has the oldest surviving example in the region: Grouseland, built between 1802 and 1804 with local brick made not far from town on a foundation of limestone from nearby quarries, and believed to be the first brick building in Vincennes and in the Indiana Territory.
Nineteenth-century brick was hand-molded in wooden molds and fired in kilns where the temperature varied a great deal from place to place in the stack. That produced a range of hardness in a single burn: hard, well-fired units that went on the weather faces, and softer, underfired units that went into interior wythes and backup work where they would stay dry. This is why an old Evansville wall can have a sound outer face and a soft interior, and why replacing a spalled unit means matching hardness as well as size, color, and texture.
Later brick is a different material. Extruded, wire-cut, machine-made units from the 20th century are harder, more uniform, and less absorbent, and they were laid in Portland-bearing mortar. Post-war brick ranches around the East Side, Newburgh, Chandler, and the newer edges of every town in this service area are that kind of wall, and the field of it usually outlasts the things attached to it.
How each one fails.
| Wall type | What fails first | Usual repair |
|---|---|---|
| Hand-molded brick, lime mortar, pre-1930 | Joints erode as designed; faces spall if repointed hard | Lime repointing, $12 to $20 per sq ft |
| Same wall with a hard Portland patch from the 1970s | Brick faces pop off beside intact joints | Replace units $20 to $40 each, repoint softer |
| Extruded brick, Type N or S, post-war | Chimney crown, steel lintels, sills, north-face joints | Crown $400 to $1,200, lintel $400 to $1,500 |
| Limestone sills and caps, any era | Erosion, cracking, lost slope and drip | Sill repair or reset, $300 to $1,200 each |
| Old rubble stone or soft brick foundation | Joints wash out below grade | Foundation repointing, $10 to $25 per sq ft |
Matching a replacement unit
Cutting out a spalled brick is the easy half. Finding one that matches is the work. On a modern wall there is often a catalog match, which is why brick replacement starts near $20 a unit. On an 1880s wall the options are salvage, a reproduction run, or cutting a whole brick down to a half-brick veneer, and the color has to work with a face that has weathered for 140 years. That is why the range runs to $40 a brick and why saving the units that fall out of your own wall genuinely saves money. Details are on the brick repair page.
The mortar around the new unit matters as much as the unit. The National Park Service’s Preservation Brief 2 requires repointing mortar to be softer and more vapor permeable than the masonry units, which on soft local brick means a lime-based mix rather than anything out of a general-purpose bag. The mortar comparison page has the strengths and the reasoning, and in a designated preservation area the historic district masonry rules explain when a visible unit replacement needs review before it happens.
All the numbers above are published in full on the pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Indiana limestone?
It is Salem Limestone, a Mississippian marine deposit quarried in south central Indiana between Bloomington and Bedford, where the first quarry opened in 1827. It is largely calcium carbonate, easy to cut in any direction, and it went into the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and roughly 35 of the 50 state capitols, as well as most of the window sills in Evansville.
Why does limestone erode on my house?
Because it is calcium carbonate, and acid rain wears it relatively quickly. Add water sitting on a horizontal surface through roughly 77 freeze-thaw cycles a winter and a sill or cap loses its surface long before the brick around it does. Sills that have lost their slope or their drip edge then push water into the wall below.
How can I tell old soft brick from modern brick?
Look at the face and the edges. Hand-molded brick from the 19th century varies in size and color within the same wall, often has a sandy or slightly irregular face, and shows soft arrises. Modern extruded brick is uniform, sharp edged, and frequently shows the wire-cut texture on the face. If your house predates about 1930, assume soft brick and lime mortar until a mason says otherwise.