and when things were local
There is a Lime Kiln Lake near Pincher Creek in southern Alberta, the Lime Kiln Trail in Ottawa, the Hart Road Lime Kiln Conservation Plan in View Royal near Victoria BC, Lime Kiln Bay in New Brunswick – when you start to look, lime kilns once were everywhere. In Agatha Christie’s The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim , written sometime before 1924, Mr Davenheim walks to the post office and vanishes. However, there is a lake, a path, a gate, and beyond it, a lime kiln. Ah. This is how a body can be disposed of – throw it into quicklime which will dissolve everything except Mr Davenheim’s distinctive gold and diamond ring – well, it didn’t happen that way, but it does indicate that lime kilns were local, ubiquitous and in use. Every town, every estate, every builder probably had one, for lime is essential for all cement work: mortar, parging, grout, stucco, pathways, foundations, floors. It was also used as fertiliser and so essential to agriculture. The process: you burn limestone, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which gives you quicklime, or calcium oxide (CaO). You mix quicklime with water to get slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide (Ca[OH]2). This is used in cementitious building products, including whitewash, which is slaked lime and chalk. Over time as slaked lime dries and hardens, it loses water and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reverting back to limestone. What a process.
Brick is not always made of clay. Gabriola Brick and Shale Products operating from 1910 - 1954, used Gabriola Island blue and brown shale. While fireclay, a glacial clay that produces a much harder brick, was found in conjunction with coal seams near Victoria and Comox on Vancouver Island, Gabriola brick used shale, crushed by millstones made from local sandstone, plus diatomaceous earth and sand. One can find perfectly round basins on Gabriola where the millstones were drilled out; and there is a Millstone River nearby in Nanaimo, another coal centre. Brick must be fired. One can map early brick production to coal mining, coke ovens and brick kilns. Up until the early twentieth century, many cities had brickworks, just as they had a lime kiln. Evidently there is either shale, clay shales, or clay throughout the western provinces, but it is only deposits near cities that were developed – it says something about the cost of transportation in the early to mid-twentieth century: punitive relative to the cost of developing a local brickyard. Transportation seems key: Cretaceous shales of ceramic value from the Pleistocene era, are sedimentary, have a low fusion temperature and a short vitrification range. China and stoneware clay, rare in BC, was the basis of the large pottery industry in Medicine Hat, Alberta, which, unlike other local brick production sites, was given a national reach facilitated by the post-1884 Canadian Pacific Railway. It seems obvious to say it, but the colour of local brick gives a specific and often unique colour to a city that derives directly from the kind of shale or shale clay the city sits upon. Most shale and clay deposits in British Columbia turn out pink to red building brick. Today, in Canada, all brick, none of it red, comes from one source of brick manufacture in Ontario. Even I-X-L of Medicine Hat, the once-dominant brick manufacturer in Western Canada, is gone. According to the 1952 BC Department of Mines bulletin (No. 30): Clay and Shale Deposits of British Columbia , clay and shale are everywhere in abundance – it is impossible that they are mined out. There must be some other economic equation in operation that makes one vast centralised brickyard with extreme delivery costs more efficient than a local industry. The histories and processes of manufacture of building materials are endlessly interesting, and in this era where global supply chains are tested by a number of things: climate change and energy consumption, political disruption, war, the corporatisation of the building industry, we might do well to think about local capacity, whether that be local as in down the street, or in this city, or that region or by country. There is nothing artisanal about this, rather a distribution of centralised plant, rather like small nuclear reactors: small, efficient, local, pulled-back technology, rather than an enormous, vulnerable installation such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Perhaps, like the nineteenth century idea of a lime kiln down the road but for different reasons, centralised consolidation is no longer efficient in the twenty-first. £
left: Hart Road Lime Kiln, Atkins Brothers Silica Lime Brick Company. Enough lime was being produced to justify a spur line from the E&N Railway, shipping a thousand barrels up island in 1899. Lime operations continued until the 1930s when the land was purchased by the Department of National Defence.
below: Stacking brick at Gabriola Brick and Shale Products, ca 1914.
Robert Duffus: 1977
GHMS Archives 1996.040.006
7 on site review 47 :: standing still
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