A making group
Made by Casting
Poured wet into a form, on the ground it stands on or at a works. One entry, and it is the only material in this catalogue with no bed, no yard and no freight bill.
Why this group has one member
Because in the period this catalogue covers, casting on the site meant one product: the hollow concrete block, made in a hand tamped machine, in the two decades either side of nineteen ten.
Poured concrete in place, as a structural material for walls and frames, belongs to a different story and to buildings of a different size. Precast units made at a plant and shipped are a later industry, and the moment they are shipped they stop being interesting in the way this group is interesting: they rejoin the freight rule that every other group obeys.
So the group is small on purpose, and its single entry is here because of what it proves rather than how common it was.
What it proves
That the arithmetic in the freight that set the price is real enough to design a product around.
A concrete block is heavy, low in value, and therefore the worst possible thing to put on a train. The answer was not to make it lighter or dearer. The answer was to move the factory: a machine cheap enough for a small builder to own, ingredients available from a local pit and a sack, and a finished unit that never travels at all.
The face that imitates another group
The most popular mold plate produced a rugged, irregular face resembling stone dressed with a pitching tool, which is the product of the cutting group. A manufactured unit was shaped to look like the result of a completely different process.
There is no deception in it. Every block is identical, the pattern repeats every course, and nobody has ever mistaken such a wall for stone. It was selling the idea of dressed stone at a price a house could carry, and that is a straightforward thing to sell.