Want a paving brick from Marietta Square's past as a souvenir? Or how about a small piece of rail from the trolley line that once circled the Square as part of its Marietta-to-Atlanta circuit? You may soon have your chance to acquire such relics.

Such reminders of the Marietta of 75 years ago are being uncovered in the course of the $1.3 million infrastructure improvement project that has been disrupting traffic around the Square in recent months. City public works crews are replacing a 6-inch water line from the 1930s with a 12-inch line, and also are adding brick crosswalks at the street corners.

That work has necessitated digging down through the layers of asphalt and brick paving stones beneath it. That has meant unearthing hundreds of the old paving bricks, not seen since the streets around the Square were paved with asphalt six decades ago.

The streets around the Square and its immediate vicinity had been paved with the bricks in 1917. The feat was accomplished by a single bricklayer, Jim Lucas, at the astonishing pace of 1,700 bricks per day, according to Becky Paden's book, "Marietta, 1833-2000."

The hundreds of bricks that are being dug up during the project are being stored at the city's public works facility. Some will be given to the Marietta Museum of History and the rest likely will be cleaned up and auctioned off at some point, according to City Manager Bill Bruton. They are bigger and heavier than standard-sized bricks, he said.

This winter's digging also has excavated rails from the Atlanta Interurban Railway line, whose electric trolleys shuttled to and from Atlanta from 1905 to 1947. The rails were still in place when the streets around the Square were covered with asphalt afterward.

Interestingly, there are two sets of rails - one under the paving bricks, and one over them, says director Dan Cox of the history museum.

As for the rails being unearthed, some will be given to the museum and the others likely will be cut into small sections and auctioned off, like the bricks, Bruton said.

In another reminder of the city's past, the digging has uncovered two of the deep cisterns once used to collect and store rainwater under each of the Square's corners for later use fighting fires. The brick-lined, bell-shaped reservoirs range from 8 to 20 feet deep, are about eight feet in diameter and could hold up to 30,000 gallons of water each, said the museum's Cox.

"They did (still) contain some water," Bruton added.

The cisterns likely were filled by rainwater possibly channeled from nearby building drains, he said.

The cisterns had not been opened since the early days of World War II, when then-Fire Chief Howard Schaefer, mindful of the possibility of Nazi air raids on the nearby Bell Aircraft plant, uncovered them to ensure they were still full of water, according to Cox.

Now that downtown boasts brick sidewalks and is getting brick crosswalks, what about the possibility of removing all the asphalt and returning to a brick-street look?

"We talked about that possibility," Bruton said. "But there would be a really steep drop from the curb down to the bricks. It would be too deep to use now. And those old bricks might be too fragile to hold the weight of modern vehicles."

However, there's always the possibility of using sturdier concrete paving stones, he said.

"That would help give a feel for how it used to be," he said.

Mayor Steve Tumlin says the prospect is intriguing.

"It would be really neat to pull up all that asphalt and have brick pavement around the Square again," he said on Thursday just prior to delivering his first State of the City speech. "But then you think about what it would cost to do that ..." he added, his voice trailing off.

That cost would be around $2.5 million, according to city public works director Dan Conn.

I suppose if we really wanted to recreate the authentic ambience of old Marietta, we could pull up the asphalt, and then all the bricks, too, and just make do with streets of dirt and dust and mud. That would probably be a little too authentic for most people - including yours truly.

But a Square surrounded by streets of brick? Now that would be something to see - and hopefully, drive on some day!

Joe Kirby is Editorial Page Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal and co-author of the new "Then & Now: Marietta Revisited."