After the Peshtigo fire destroyed many Belgian farms and small towns along the west side of the Door Peninsula on October 8, 1871, Belgian settlers rebuilt with bricks instead of logs, and a household brickmaking industry emerged to supply them. Many of the resulting distinctive red brick structures still survive and shape the region’s architectural character. The Vandermissen Brickworks operated as early as 1899 and ceased between 1905 and 1917, alongside other small brickworks such as the Macco Brickworks in Kewaunee County and the G. Peters Brickworks northeast of Vandermissen. It was the first late 19th- and early 20th-century brickworks in the region to be excavated, and archaeology there recovered evidence of the typical five-step hand-brickmaking process: clay was dug by hand in the fall and left through winter to soften, then ground and screened, mixed with sand and water in a ring pit or pug mill, hand-pressed into sand-lined wooden forms, dried in the sun and stacked in hacks, and finally fired for several days in a brick clamp kiln.