A stretcher course is a row of brick laid with the long face, the stretcher, exposed, the standard orientation used for the great majority of coursing in a brick wall.
Most of any brick wall, veneer or solid, is stretcher courses, since laying brick on its long face uses fewer bricks to cover more area and is the fastest, most economical way to build. Running bond is simply stacked stretcher courses offset by half a brick each row. Header courses, soldier courses, and rowlocks are all departures from the stretcher course, used sparingly for structural ties or decorative accents against the plain field of stretcher brick.
Because stretcher courses make up the bulk of a wall's visible face, they're also where weathering shows up first: hairline cracking, faded mortar color, spalled faces from freeze-thaw cycling. When we're assessing a wall for repointing versus a full rebuild, we're really reading the condition of the stretcher courses across the whole face, since that's the majority of what's holding water out and, on solid masonry, carrying load. A wall can have a handful of failed header or soldier accents and still be sound if the stretcher field underneath is solid.
More masonry vocabulary from the glossary.
The services where this term comes up.
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