Follow the yellow brick road

Well, unless you’re trekking from Sidney, La Rivière, or Leary. Then you’d be following the red brick road.

Fredrick Guise Stevens

Mom’s dad, Fredrick Guise Stevens, was the only child of Mary Elizebeth and Frank N. Stevens. In 1907, at the age of 23, he sailed out of Liverpool on the S.S. Siberian bound for Halifax. His occupation was "coal miner." 

Ten years later, Fred married Zelma Victoria Hood, on November 14, 1917. Otherwise, we know very little about him. Indeed, Dad never even met his father-in-law, because Fred died on November 13, 1949.

The Stevens family, including Mom and her five brothers, lived in a number of small Manitoba towns, as Fred sought employment in the brick-making industry.

Three of the many brick plant towns the Stevens family lived in: Sidney (blue square), Roseisle (green triangle), and La Rivière (red circle)

Brick Making in Manitoba

Manitoba’s building boom of 1880 to 1912 was an especially prosperous time for the brick-making industry. The Winnipeg Tribune noted on September 9, 1911 that:

There is on an average one hundred millions of bricks being imported every year from the United States to the city of Winnipeg, and the demand is far in excess of the supply, so the natural consequence is that the common people are prohibited from building their homes with this desired material.

Likewise, a July 19, 1913 ad in the Tribune promoting investment in the British Canadian Brick & Coal Co., Ltd. noted:

It is a recognized fact that Brick and Coal are the commodities most in demand in this country and the combination is one of the most profit-making known. Contractors today are behind held up for want of brick despite the fact that over one million bricks per day are imported into Manitoba from the States.

There is no brick-making plant in Canada which is properly managed that is not making huge profits, and to insure the greatest security to the Shareholders the Company has employed the services of one of Canada's most expert brick men.

Interest in Real Estate is on the wane and legitimate development of the vast wealth of our country is taking its proper place. Use your capital to develop your industries, and get some of the cream that is going to foreign investors. 

Manitoba’s plentiful clay and shale deposits (60 major sites) supported about 175 brick manufacturing plants. These operations varied greatly in size, output, quality and longevity.

In those years, even with steam and horse power, the work was hard, and workers typically earned between two and three dollars for a 10-hour day. It was seasonal but steady work, typically May to September.

Even small yards were productive. Steam-powered brick makers could turn out 20,000 bricks per day, or about 100,000 in a week.

Fred Stevens hard at work -- where, when and doing what is anybody's guess.

La Rivière Brickworks

La Rivière is nestled in the beautiful Pembina Valley, 18 km east of Pilot Mound on Hwy. 3. Long before it was known for its skiing, the town boasted an impressive brick plant.

Brick plant at the east side of La Rivière (Source: Turning Leaves)

A 1905 Geological Survey [3] reporting on clay and shale deposits in western Canada, examined four shale types in southern Manitoba: Dakota, Benton, Niobrara, and Pierre. Because of their differences (like burning colour, plasticity, shrinkage, and tensile strength), the report recommended that Pierre shales, such as those at La Rivière, be mixed with Niobrara shales from Leary’s. La Rivière was described thusly:

This town is situated on a railway about 84 miles southwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The town itself lies in a small valley surrounded by low hills, the slopes of many of which show outcrops of the Pierre shale, and it is quite evident from the numerous outcrops around the town and those in the railway cuttings to the east of the town that there is a very large quantity of this material available. The plant of the Phoenix Pressed Brick Co. is located on the edge of the town at the base of one of these shale escarpments.

The bank of shale is about 70 feet in height, and the material extends in a practically unweathered condition right up to the grass roots.

A tram led directly to the shale deposits, La Rivière (Source: Turning Leaves)

Turning Leaves: a History of La Rivière and District [4] published in 1979, notes that the brickyard opened in 1902 and stayed in business for about five years, changing hands many times. The Geological Survey (p.23), however, noted some new equipment at the plant during a visit in June 1911.

Two of the beehive kilns, La Rivière (Source: Virtual Manitoba [1])

The brickyards used beehive kilns. These are round brick structures wrapped in steel bands to contain the expansion caused by the kiln’s heat. Bricks are stacked inside with space between so the heat can encircle them. Early structures used wood and coke as fuel, later replaced by gas and oil for better temperature control. The beehive kiln requires at least one week to burn the brick, which limits production.

Sidney Brickworks

The Stevens family also lived in Sidney, 147 km due west of Winnipeg on Hwy. 1. In its day, the small town also featured a brick plant almost as large as that in La Rivière. The Manitoba Historical Society [5] lists it as an historical site:

In 1909, the Sidney Brick and Tile Company began operations, erecting a brickworks two years later at a site west of the village of Sidney. It supplied red-coloured brick for the construction of numerous buildings throughout Manitoba, including several schools in Brandon, the Eaton’s Mail Order building in Winnipeg, and Minto Armoury in Winnipeg, as well as places elsewhere in Canada and the United States.

A shortage of labour as a result of the First World War led to closure of the facility in the early 1920s. Instead, clay quarried at the site was shipped to Winnipeg to be made into bricks there. The property was owned by Alsip’s Building Products until 1985 when it was sold as farmland to a local resident. A large depression over much of the site identifies the location of clay excavation. The foundations of several buildings are still visible, as are the remnants of five brick kilns, water wells, and a loading ramp to a now-removed railway siding on the adjacent Canadian Pacific Railway main line.

Sidney Brickyard, circa 1912 (Source: Manitoba Historical Society)

Workers at the Sidney Brickyard (Source: Rob McInnes, Manitoba Historical Society)

Sidney Brickyard (Source: Rob McInnes, Manitoba Historical Society)

A narrow-gauge railway transported bricks through this tunnel between the kilns and storage buildings. (Source: Gordon Goldsborough, Manitoba Historical Society) 

Leary Brickworks

Roseisle is a picturesque prairie town, 27 km west of Carman on Hwy. 245. Mom attended grades 7 and 8 here, and it is where a number of her relatives, including her parents, Fred and Zelma (née Hood) Stevens, are buried.

Zelma was born March 12, 1898 in Leary, Manitoba, just west of Roseisle. It is in Leary that her Ontario-born parents, Oscar Edmund Hood (June 2, 1862 - January 23, 1938) and Mary Rosanna (née Weir) (September 6, 1871 - October 31, 1938) died. "Leary" likely refers to the Hood family farm, as the locale was little more than a whistle-stop (although there was a wee Leary School established in 1911).

The bustling metropolis of Leary, Manitoba

However remote, no discussion of Manitoba brick plants would be complete without mention of the Leary Brickworks. As the only existing plant of its era, its now-derelict buildings and kiln are a unique provincial historic site.

The Leary Brickworks in 2010, featuring a tall drying shed, engine room, beehive kiln and towering brick chimney (Source: Gordon Brown, Manitoba Historical Society)

The story was told by Sharon Reilly, in the Urban History Review (Spring 2007) [6].

The company was founded in 1900 as the Boyne Valley Brick Company by John George Leary, one of several Irish Protestants who immigrated to Manitoba in the early 1880s.

The location alongside the Boyne River in the Pembina Valley provided shale, sand, water, and wood for fuel, along with a railway siding to ship its products, a salmon-red construction brick.

Early pressed brick, circa 1911 (Source: Ina Bramadat, Manitoba Historical Society)

A later dry-pressed, single-frog brick, circa 1953. The indent (frog) allowed extra mortar, which adds strength in a masonry wall. (Source: Ina Bramadat, Manitoba Historical Society)

The plant produced good quality bricks and provided employment for nearby farmers and unemployed labourers. In the engine room, up to 12,000 bricks could be pressed in a day. Women found work maintaining the workers’ bunkhouses, keeping vegetable gardens, and working as cooks. Sometimes children worked there, too, usually turning the wet bricks to facilitate drying prior to being fired in the kiln.

George Leary, at left, supervises the dismantling of a temporary kiln used prior to the construction of the beehive kiln. (Source: Ina Bramadat, Manitoba Historical Society)

A worker atop the beehive kiln monitors the 12- to 16-day firing process, May 1947. (Source: Ina Bramadat, Manitoba Historical Society)

The same kiln in 2010 (Source: Lone Star Farm [7])

The site included a three-storey high, 85×40-foot drying shed and a 56×40-foot engine room. Water for the boiler was pumped from the nearby Boyne River, and the clay and sand travelled in cars on an elevated tramway from the opposite banks.

Learys Brick Company letterhead, 1910

In 1905 Leary re-financed the brickworks as the Dominion Press Brick Company, with a number of Winnipeg-based partners (including Premier R. P. Roblin). By 1910 Leary had regained control and ran the company with his sons as Learys Brick Company. But by 1917 falling demand, the popularity of frame homes, and a wartime labour shortage (including his sons’ military service) forced him to close down.

Interior of the beehive kiln. It could fire 80,000 "green" bricks at a time, at temperatures up to 1800° F. (Source: Gordon Goldsborough, Manitoba Historical Society)

George’s son William returned after WWI hoping to re-open the business by the end of the 1930s, but war intervened again. After WWII, he finally refurbished the plant and tried to start up the operation again in 1948, but found he could no longer compete with larger firms. When William died in 1951 the yard was closed. Erven Tallman purchased the yard in 1962 and after a single failed attempt to make bricks, chose to sell the property back to the Leary family.

Leary's circa 1950 (Source: Ina Bramadat, Manitoba Historical Society)

Today, the site is abandoned and deteriorating, inaccessible because of its many dangers. Check it out online instead, at http://vimeo.com/42634915.

Sources

[1]  www.virtualmanitoba.com/Classroom/photos/industry/PDF/1.pdf 
[2]  www.hartneyheritage.ca/wemade/p20.html
[3]  http://wmsmir.cits.rncan.gc.ca/index.html/pub/geott/ess_pubs/100/100499/me_025.pdf
[4]  http://manitobia.ca/resources/books/local_histories/154.pdf 
[5]  www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/sidneybrickworks.shtml
[6]  http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1015924ar
[7]  http://lonestarfarm.ca/LearyBrickWorks.htm