Built in 1851, the Carpentry Shop is one of the oldest brick buildings in Bishop Hill and originally served as a manufacturing and fabrication center for colony furniture and wagon components. Its bottom floor was the general work area, and double doors on the second floor on the east side provided access to the paint shop. Bishop Hill furniture that has survived from the past few centuries was likely created there. The building used bricks made and kiln-fired by the whole community, including women and children, at a brickyard in the northeast corner of town. Rich local clay produced the bricks, whose color and strength depended on firing temperature, with cooler bricks around the kiln's edge turning orange and softer and interior bricks becoming brown and harder. Damaged bricks are being replaced with new handmade bricks to preserve the hand-formed surface textures called sand creases, using custom forms that replicate the original slightly longer Colony bricks.