Medicine Hat started its industrial life as Divisional Headquarters for the Canadian Pacific Railway, located halfway between Winnipeg and Vancouver, so well-serviced by transportation that it attracted manufacturing and distribution industries. It sits on enormous reserves of natural gas which gave, and still do give, Medicine Hat very inexpensive heat, light and power. As incentives, the city added free water, building sites and tax concessions and by 1900 was a substantial industrial centre. Firing clay into useable products relies on a consistent and high-temperature heat source in the kilns – that was provided by natural gas. Clay was also abundant and was transformed into brick, tile, sewer pipe and industrial ceramics by large companies and small family-run factories. 1 All the clay used in manufacturing in Medicine Hat comes from the Upper Cretaceous Whitemud Formation in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. The upper part of the Whitemud Formation, the Eastend Formation contains non-marine sands, silts and clays formed by fast mechanical weathering of new volcanic mountains. Whitemud sediments come from slow chemical weathering and leaching after the volcanic mountains have been worn down. 2 This is where kaolin is found, the ingredient that produces a hard white ceramic. Whitemud Formation clay was found at East End, Saskatchewan. Other Whitemud clays with a lower kaolin content, from Wood Mountain, from Claybank and from the Cypress Hills was, and is, used for brick. 3 There is a lovely conjunction between the placenames of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta and the names of the various clay deposits. Medalta had clay holdings at Chocolate Drop Hill in East End, specifically chocolate clay, a dark, plastic clay which when fired was paler than stoneware. Saskachewan Ball Clay from Willow, Saskatchewan was a white-burning clay, clearly full of kaolin, while stoneware clays came from Ravenscrag. I-XL Brick, formed in 1886, mined and fired the clay found on site at Redcliff, Alberta. This clay produced a bright red brick, the first red brick in western Canada and found on all southern prairie brick buildings built during the building boom of the 1900s. 4 Utility brick, even today, tends to be yellow. The potteries that operated in Medicine Hat between 1900 and the second world war, produced a wide range of products. Stoneware crocks were ubiquitous across the homesteading prairies: every basement had a collection for putting down sauerkraut, making beer, storing eggs and dill pickles. From Medalta’s white clay deposits at Willow came a vast production of hotel, restaurant and household china. The CPR and CNR trains and hotels, the Hudson’s Bay and Eaton’s all obliged in using and distributing Medalta ware across the west, and by 1921 to the much larger markets of eastern Canada. 5 WHITEMUD CLAY rural urbanism | potteries by stephanie white geology minerals resources settlement transportation
fire pottery transformations
Stephanie White
Medicine Hat Potteries pudding basins, circa 1950. Steamed Christmas puddings, suet puddings, cranberry duff, figgy duff: these were often Canada’s desserts up until the end of WWII, and every house had a stack of white bowls produced in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
The line drawn from the eruptions of volcanos throwing new minerals and metals from the heart of the earth up to the surface, and the surface eroding into silts that become clay, that clay being discovered, mined and made into products in a series of small communities, connected by the Canadian Pacific Railway and facilitated by natural gas reserves – this is a deep narrative line that was responsible for how prairie towns looked, how buildings were built, how Canadian kitchens were equipped, how food was stored. It is a line that includes the production of firebrick, a product essential during both world wars to tanks, ships and train engines and dependent on both near-free energy and special CPR concession rates. We so often concentrate on our recent history, that of settlement and industry, without acknowledging that it all depends on what happened millions of years ago. n 1 Mason, Ron. ‘Historic Clay District History’. medalta.org 2 Byers, P N. ‘Mineralogy and origin of the upper Eastend and Whitemud Formations of south-central and southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences , 1969. 6:(2) 317- 334, 10.1139/e69-027 3 Hamilton,WN, Olson, RA. ‘Mineral Resources of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin’. Alberta Geological Survey. http://www.ags.gov.ab.ca/ publications/wcsb_atlas/a_ch34/ch_34.html#kaolin 4 Antonelli, Marylu and Jack Forbes. Pottery in Alberta . Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1978. 5 Holt, Faye Reineberg. Alberta, a history in photographs . Victoria: Heritage House Publishing, 2009
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