08/25/2026
“…Fellow came in here and took a look at it. Looked at how big it is, how high…says, ‘Did you have a machine to do this?’ I says, ‘Sure is, you can’t do it without a machine.’ I says, ‘There it is.’” Here, Bill offered his two hands, palms up for emphasis. “Ten fingers!”
“He says, ‘I hardly believe it.’”
“I says, ‘Look here. I did that. If you hardly believe it, I haven’t got time to talk to you no more. You better skiddoo. Because you don’t understand.’”
• Alberta Clay Products blaster Bill Hrehorchuk in 1975 on explaining how he could extract clay from the prairie
Bill Hrehorchuk was born in Austria in 1893 and migrated to Canada in 1912. He would eventually end up in Medicine Hat, where jobs were plentiful with the recent discovery of natural gas in 1904 and the connections with the Canadian Pacific Railway. One of these companies was the Alberta Clay Products (ACP) Company, established in 1908, which would go on to produce a wide range of clay products including face brick, hollow tile, clay pipe, and fire brick. South of Medicine Hat near the Cypress Hills, large deposits of clay were available, and just outside of Dunmore, a 320-acre fire brick deposit, some 90 feet deep, lay dormant.
By the time Bill arrived in town, 19 years old, unskilled, but not afraid of work, the ACP had a brick plant second in size and capacity only to one other in North America and was providing work for 325 people. Although he never worked in a quarry before, the young Austrian took the dangerous job of blasting clay out of the Company’s Dunmore pit. In return, they set him up with a house at the foot of the huge clay bank, from which in a “damn good year” he extracted up to 200 tons a day.
Bill had a contract with the ACP to supply 4 to 5 railway cars of clay a day at $15 per carload (approx. $500 presently). He had a crew of 8 – 9 men working under him, who mined clay for 6 days a week, morning to night, all year long. Nearby, a second company-owned pit yielded a similar quantity of clay under the supervision of another man on a separate contract.
The clay was hauled from the open pits in small mining cars (pulled by horses or pushed manually) that ran on narrow-gauge tracks to the end of the ramp. From there it was dumped into the waiting CPR cars below. It took 8 or 9 carloads of clay a day to feed the ACP’s 14 round kilns, which turned out 80,000 bricks and 24,000 6-inch pipes a day to supply Western Canada’s construction boom. Part of it included a 500-boxcar order of firebrick for the new CPR shops in Calgary. Another new pit, in the Frenchman River Valley near East End, Saskatchewan, was able to help the company produce high-grade pipe that could be manufactured economically and profitably.
In the mid 1950s, the ACP went through some ownership changes and was eventually acquired by a local company, I-XL Industries Limited, in 1960. When I-XL purchased the plant, the Dunmore pits were closed, and Bill went to work at the plant. Pushing 70, with nearly 50 years of clay hauling experience, he hadn’t thought about retirement. In early January 1961, that changed when a fire broke out at the plant, burning it to the ground. The fire came as no surprise to anyone who had been close to the industry. Constructed in the early days of the century, when building and fire codes were unheard of, and expanded in a haphazard fashion, plants like the ACP and Medalta were known as fire traps.
“Claypit Bill” Hrehorchuk lived out his remaining days in the old company house south of Dunmore, passing away at age 83 on September 25, 1976.
All that remains of the ACP plant in Medicine Hat is a solitary kiln. Plainsman Clay operates a small building on the former brick plant site.
Drone filming of the Dunmore pits occurred in July 2026.
Information from:
- Medalta Potteries website (https://medalta.org/)
- University of Lethbridge Southern Alberta Aerial Photography digital collection
- “Pottery in Alberta: The Long Tradition” by Marylu Antonelli & Jack Forbes – University of Alberta Press (1978)
- Esplanade Museum & Archives
- Plains, Trains, and Wagon Wheels (Dunmore History Book) 1994
