How a Licking County winter wears on a Newark chimney
Newark sits inland, away from any lake, but the local weather is no kinder to masonry for it. The valley traps damp air, the temperature swings hard between a sunny afternoon and a hard overnight freeze, and that swing is what does the slow damage. Brick and mortar are porous. They soak up rain and snowmelt, and when the soaked masonry freezes, the water inside expands and pushes the material apart from the inside out. A single winter barely registers. String together a dozen of Ohio's freeze and thaw cycles and you get the flaking brick faces, the crumbling joints you can dig out with a key, and the cracked crowns we are called to rebuild every spring.
The other half of the story is how hard these chimneys actually run. Heating with wood is common around Newark and the rural stretches of Licking County, and a household that burns through the season puts a lot of smoke up the flue. Wood smoke is where creosote comes from, and the cooler and slower a fire smolders, the heavier the deposit it leaves on the flue walls. A chimney drafting a load of that tar-like residue is the single most common cause of a chimney fire. So two forces work the structure from opposite sides at once. Water grinds in from the outside through freeze and thaw, creosote stacks up on the inside from heavy use, and a chimney that goes several winters without a sweep or a scan is building both problems quietly and at the same time.