About Plainsman Clays

Plainsman Clays in 1962

We have over 40 years of experience
in every facet of the clay business.

Today
At Plainsman we don't just buy refined minerals and force-fit them to pottery. Western Canada is Clay Country, tens of thousands of square kilometers of it, the best deposits in North America. We handle all aspects of the mining and manufacturing process.

We mine clay from sites in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Montana and Idaho. Beds are usually level marine sediments that are very clean and consistent. We have unlimited supplies of a very wide range of high quality clay materials.

This outcrop of clay in the Whitemud Formation clay is clean, pure, and ready to use for stoneware with the simple addition of water, no grinding or blending with anything else is necessary!

We mine clay in large quantities. The layers are usually 2 to 5 feet thick and they are level and consistent. Some quarries have many different kinds of clays, one above the other, and we separate them.

We mine it, test it, and process it for one purpose: Pottery.

The excellent clay deposits have made Medicine Hat a center for ceramic industry since the late 1800s. Brick, pipe, tile, pottery, crockery and many other products have been made in huge quantities using the local clays.

In fact, Plainsman Clays is built on the site of the former Alberta Clay Products, a producer of vitrified clay pipe for 50 years until the mid 1950s.