Brick streets first arrived 100 years ago

About a century ago Henryetta residents no longer had to worry about muddy, rutted streets when they went about their daily business.
During a five-year period starting in 1917 some 225,000 square yards of bricks were laid down. Many of those bricks can still be seen in their original locations along Broadway and peeking through the broken asphalt on other streets.
The bricks are two and a half inches thick and were placed on a one inch dirt and sand bed above, of all things, a five-inch thick concrete base.
The work was carried out in a series of paving districts at a cost of just over two cents per brick.
Recently a dozen photographs surfaced showing the brick work underway on Broadway. Those photos were taken from several different views and many show the streets lined with young trees about two to three inches in diameter.
Facing the streets in a number of photos were homes built in the Craftsman style ranging from one to two stories. One of the photographs shows the First United Methodist Church building that sat at the intersection of Sixth and Broadway. The multi-story building dwarfed several adjacent homes for some 40 years until a new worship facility was built on the Lake Road.
In another photograph, a two-story building with wooden porch overhang is shown on the north side of that same intersection. That building was home to a number of businesses and even the popular, “Teen Town” weekly dance hangout.
Many of the homes came from the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog. That mail-order business, a precursor to today’s Amazon, provided some 300 to 400 different models and came in kits delivered by train then built by local contractors. Cost ranged from $191 for a three room house to an elaborate ten room structure with majestic pillars that sold for $6,488 (about $103,000 in today’s dollars.)