"The brickworks are unique. You won't find anything like it anywhere. Those kilns and all the old equipment are awesome. It's a working piece of B.C. history and should be preserved."
My photos could never fully capture this amazing site- every window, wall, and kiln was fascinating, full of dust and texture and decades of work. Interesting to try and guess how bricks were made here- the process was likely very labour intensive compared to modern operations. I didn't have the time or equipment to properly document this historic place, but I wish at least some of it had been preserved as a museum.
The Kilgard plant dates back to the 1930s, and was located within the territory of the Sumas First Nation. The plant was owned and run by them after 1979, and its final operator was Se:math Industries (Wikipedia link)
I took photos on site in 2012 and 2013. To my surprise this historic site was completely demolished and remediated in 2021/22, which seems a great loss to the industrial history of the area and artisanal brickmaking in the Lower Mainland.
Jump to: "Bleak Brick Future" a newspaper article from 2006 describing the plant and interviewing production manager Ray Silver.
ESRI Aerial photo of the Sumas brick plant site in 2020. Rough description: Clay and shale would come down the mountain and enter the storage bays/ grinding area (large grey roof building). White roof is the brick making area. Drying sheds attached, to the right. Main office building near the road. The kilns were in the peaked roof sheds near the bottom of the lot.
Dirt caked grinding machinery in the upper clay loading levels. Blackberry bushes invading the old sheds.
Old signage in the clay sheds.
Bays in the upper shed for holding specific types of clay or shale. Signs above the bays bore stenciled names like Kilgard Brown, Sumas Buff, Sumas Fawn, Red Shale.
Conveyors and hoppers in the upper shed where clays would be ground, mixed, and fed into the plant.
Looking down onto the factory brick making floor.
Sloped metal factory rooflines and missing windows. Old square brick smokestack overgrown with weeds.
Large overhead window bays allow natural light into the factory. The buildings had a "sawtooth" roofline with many windows common to older factories.
The extruder head for making bricks. Seemed odd they left it packed up with dried material from the last production run.
Large rotary drum slicer. A conveyor moved an extruded rectangular stream of clay through this device that would slice it into individual bricks using taught wires.
A view of the process that fed clays into a mixing/compacting machine which extruded a stream of clay in the desired shape.
Adjacent building storing more drum slicer machinery and extruded bricks.
Ready made bricks stacked for drying.
Storage building with piles of damaged bricks, dried bricks, old machinery and junk. The green tint is from fibergalss panels that replaced the windows.
Pallets of discarded bricks underneath the large air-moving ductwork that supplied the drying rooms.
Outside, historic and varied brickwork is everywhere, including the pair of tall square chimneys.
Historic brick kilns where the bricks were fired. Pallets of finished brick left outside.
Ghostly explorer inside one of the large kilns.
Historic kilns and ready bricks under a protective roof. Note the large metals bands binding the kilns together, and array of gas pipes for firing.
Pallets of fired bricks ready to ship. Kiln in the background, showing the gas burner on the side of the kiln.
Bleak brick future: Once a booming business, the Sumas brickworks now languishes:
by Bellett, Gerry
SUMAS FIRST NATION RESERVE - Seventy-seven he might be and his eyesight isn't what it was, but Ray Silver
still scales the gantries of his beloved old brickworks with vigour. And under his hands, all this ancient machinery -- a
lost piece of the Industrial Revolution buried in the Fraser Valley -- is handled as if it were a vintage Rolls Royce.
"After 60 years of working here, you begin to love it," says Silver, production manager of Sumas Clay Products.
He probably knows more about bricks than anyone alive and his sheer bloody-mindedness has kept the Sumas First
Nation in the brick business for three decades.
But today the kilns lie cold, mounds of unsold bricks are stacked with nowhere to go, and the business appears to
have collapsed, perversely considering a building boom of historic proportions is underway in the rest of British
Columbia.
Considering the world is also full of people who want something different, it's hard to believe that first-quality bricks
virtually hand-made by a native Indian band, could want for buyers. The same bricks that are good enough for
Japanese government buildings or the Boeing Company; bricks that are fired in kilns made to burn wood or coal
using a process older than recorded history.
But that's the case.
With no orders, no sales, no marketing, it all seems hopeless -- but Silver isn't giving up.
"If we could just get some orders, I could bring the guys back. Get this place going again. Get some money to fix
things," he says, gazing at holes high in the roof corners of the world's only aboriginal brick plant, through which rain
is pouring.
Those who believe you're not beaten if you're still fighting would recognize a champion of some fortitude in Silver,
who took an unwanted and archaic industrial site and turned it into a money- maker.
That was in 1979, when the last non-native company to use the original Clayburn brickworks -- built on the reserve
100 years ago - - quit the site. Left behind was an industrial complex of English- built kilns and iron machinery that
would look more at home in the cobblestone industrial towns of Lancashire than against the side of Sumas
Mountain.
"My nephew was chief at the time and I said, 'Let's take over the plant and make bricks ourselves.' And damn it, we
did."
"He wanted to know where we would get the clay from and I told him to begin with we'd buy it from Clayburn -- who
are our good friends -- but I knew where other seams were because I'd prospected the mountain and so me and my
son got some rock drilling equipment and dynamite and blasted open the seams.
"I remember putting the roof on this shed and standing on the top and looking out at the Fraser Valley and saying,
'You bastards will never laugh at us again -- as long as I'm alive we'll damn-well make bricks.' And we did. But now
it's a boneyard.
"It's sad for the guys like me and the white guys I worked with to see it now," says Silver.
At one time, the plant employed as many as 56 workers; now it's down to four.
Bricks from here can be seen all over Vancouver. They line the streets of Gastown, the fronts of buildings
throughout the downtown and are stepped on each day by the hundreds of thousands of passengers using SkyTrain
-- at least those using the original 13 stations.
"We were hoping they'd buy our bricks for the SkyTrain extension. We got promises but that was all," says Silver.
"This place is full of empty promises. You'd think our government would be proud of a native band doing this kind of
work but I guess they're not.
"It used to be that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Now the only good Indian is one who's on welfare
because that's where they seem to want us because it keeps government workers employed and then they can all
say, 'I told you so.'"
It would be easy to dismiss Silver's bitterness as a tirade, but this is coming from someone who has been working in
the brick industry since 1944 -- when he was 15 and unable to enter Canada's merchant navy -- and who never
tolerated laziness.
"I get mad at people who don't want to come to work and take everything for granted. I've had good crews here from
this band and other bands. When they come here, they work. If they don't, they can go back on to the big W," he
says.
His catalogue of black, red, grey and mottled bricks and pavers are unique. Their names, such as Black Raven,
Frontier Dark and Salish, hint at who manufactures them.
The century-old blacksmith shop that survived a fire that wiped out most of the original factory buildings in 1948,
causing the Clayburn Company to move its brick works to its present site in Abbotsford, is now Silver's machine
shop.
It's filled with extrusion dies for all kinds of bricks and pavers and if anyone wants something different, "we'll make it.
What we can't make by machine I'll make by hand."
Over the years, he's had builders and architects drop by because they needed a special brick they couldn't pull off
the shelf.
He made 80,000 bricks for an extension to a brick church in Bellingham, Wash. after the American architect couldn't
find a match from American brickmakers.
"I went down and saw the American bricks alongside the church and they were nothing like it," he says.
A specialty of the company is the Salish murals that his son -- also named Ray -- carves in brick.
An example of his artistry, the Black Raven Mural, can be found on the side of the Matsqui Recreation Centre. He
carves the raw brick in the wet room, where raw bricks are stored before they are fired, then carefully dismantles the
carving and places it inside a kiln.
The company's eight kilns are among the most historic industrial buildings surviving in B.C., although today some
have trees sprouting from their domes.
Girt in iron bands, some of these six-metre (20-foot) high kilns were built to be fired by coal or wood. They still have
the original fire boxes at intervals around their base, although bunker oil and natural gas have long since displaced
those fuels.
"I'm probably the last person alive who's ever run those kilns on coal and wood," says Silver.
"We'd throw the fuel in there," he says kicking the outside of the firebox "and pour in the salt when we were firing
sewer pipe in order to glaze them."
The kilns are beautiful caverns of soaring bricks that arch to a small aperture in the centre of a spherical roof.
"J.W. Ball, an Englishman, built this," says Silver, entering one of the smaller beehives that he describes as an
English downdraft kiln, craftily constructed to concentrate heat evenly on 40,000 bricks that could be stacked in its
centre.
"The reason we've still got these things today is they were designed and built by really good people. Just look at the
brickwork -- it's wonderful. They knew how to conserve fuel. Even today, they're very efficient and there's no
difference between them and the modern tunnel kilns when it comes to making good, hard bricks."
If the brickworks have had their day -- and Silver won't allow it -- the whole complex could one day be transformed
into an industrial museum.
Vancouver immigration consultant Wilfred Vacheresse is acting for a number of immigrant clients who might be
interested in developing the site for tourism in partnership with the band.
"It's something we've approached the chief and council about. The brickworks are unique. You won't find anything
like it anywhere. Those kilns and all the old equipment are awesome. It's a working piece of B.C. history and should
be preserved," says Vacheresse.
Europe is full of tourism sites based on vanished industries.
The Trencherfield Mill, a former cotton mill in Wigan, England, and no older than the Sumas brickworks, is the major
tourist attraction in a city that reaps over half a billion dollars a year from tourism.
There are old slate mines buried hundreds of feet under Welsh mountains that people pay good money to visit and
where, if they are not claustrophobic, people can rent space for wedding receptions.
"It's not hard to imagine a destination tourism site at the brickworks with an interpretive centre explaining how the
brickworks operate as well as a centre for aboriginal culture," says Vacheresse.
"It's right off the freeway and certainly rates, in historical terms, as high as the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Richmond
which the federal government restored. You can tour around Vancouver today and see the bricks that have been
made here," says Vacheresse.
So far, only preliminary discussions have been held between Vacheresse and Chief Dalton Silver.
The chief views the brickworks with some concern as the band has lost money in recent years as orders dried up.
There are about $250,000 worth of bricks in storage waiting to be sold. Local marketing was done by a band
member who has died and there have been difficulties finding a replacement.
"They've had problems with marketing, that's for sure. The person they have in the U.S. doesn't seem to be
successful. We've lost some money on the plant but it has employed people so we have to take that into account,"
says Chief Silver.
"We're hoping Ray gets orders but things lately have been slower than usual," he admits.
As for the tourism option, that's intriguing.
"There are buildings in the valley only 80 years old that have been turned into historical centres. We've got buildings
a lot older than that and a lot more interesting. I could see a combination of an historical centre and working
brickworks.
"I still think there's a market for our bricks, it's just that no one seems to know about us. "
Publication title: The Vancouver Sun; Vancouver, B.C.
Publication date: May 5, 2006