Inside Claybank: Exploring Saskatchewan’s abandoned brick factory

“We’re going to kind of sneak into the fence.”

Dan Flegel said it with the ease of someone who has done this once or twice before.

The buildings that make up the Claybank Brick Plant have deteriorated badly enough that the public can no longer walk through them as they once did.

But Flegel has a few tricks up his sleeve to get inside.

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Within the factory’s walls, the silence is profound. It’s difficult to reconcile it with what this place must once have sounded like.

There are no workers shouting over machinery. No carts rolling along the tracks. No belts turning. No constant mechanical thunder.

Only the occasional sound of a boot against dirt.

While the Claybank Brick Factory can still be viewed from the outside while hiking in the surrounding hills, very few people are permitted inside. Safety concerns led to the buildings being closed to the public. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Dust hangs in the air. The smell of diesel lingers. And everywhere you look, there are reminders that this was once a working factory.

Flegel moved deeper into the plant, past machinery he had once worked beside every day.

Then he stopped, reaching for a switch.

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Somewhere in the darkness, a motor coughed. One belt shuddered and began to move. Then another.

The old machinery slowly gathered itself, and the silence that had settled over the factory was broken by the first sounds of movement.

For just a few seconds, Claybank came back to life.

Dan Flegel started his work in the Claybank Brick Plant on this very machine. He worked as a helper on the brick press, earning $3.23 an hour in 1973. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

It’s hard to imagine that this dilapidated structure was once one of Saskatchewan’s most important industrial sites.

The Claybank Brick Plant sits south of Moose Jaw, surrounded by open prairie and the rolling hills of southern Saskatchewan. It’s easy to wonder why anyone would have built a massive factory here in the first place.

The answer is underfoot. Literally.

The clay in this area was unusually good for making firebrick, a type of brick that can take an enormous amount of heat without falling apart. The factory opened in 1914 and operated until March of 1989.

The Claybank Brick Plant opened in 1914 and remained in operation for 75 years. The business was officially closed in 1989. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

A lot of brick came out of these buildings over 75 years. Some of it went into places you might recognize.

The Bessborough in Saskatoon. The Gravelbourg Cathedral. Courthouses in Humboldt and Swift Current. The Balfour Apartments in Regina. Even the Château Frontenac in Quebec City.

But the bricks made here didn’t just end up in buildings.

They went into locomotives. Furnaces. Boilers. Oil refineries. Power plants.

And then they went to war.

Once dug from the hills, clay would be transported to this storage space before eventually being turned into bricks. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

During the Second World War, Claybank supplied firebrick for Canadian-built corvettes and destroyers — ships that left Canadian ports and headed into the Atlantic.

“The Atlantic Ocean is littered with Claybank brick,” Flegel noted solemnly.

And Claybank’s story actually goes beyond the sea.

It goes to space.

The kilns at the Claybank Brick Plant were initially heated with coal. As technology evolved, they introduced gas as a fuel source for the factory. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Claybank firebrick was shipped to Florida and used at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral. The high quality brick helped protect the launchpad from the incredible heat produced by a rocket taking off.

It was installed in 1965. Three years later, Apollo 8 lifted off from that very pad. It was the first crewed mission to travel to the moon.

The clay from these hills has survived furnaces, warships and rocket launches.

Now, it’s the factory itself that needs to survive.

Flegel said that in recent years, water has caused incredible damage to the many pieces of machinery that still sit within the Claybank Brick Plant. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Flegel started working here in 1973. He was 19 years old.

At the time, many of the workers around him were in their 30s and 40s. To a 19-year-old, that seemed ancient.

“I’m thinking ‘Bunch of old buggers,’” he recalled with a laugh. “Now I’m 30 years older than they were when they worked here.”

The people he thought of as old men are long gone, but the bones of the factory where they worked is still here.

Remnants of bricks in varying stages of completion litter the site. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

He paused beside the very machine he had started on more than 50 years earlier.

“That’s called a brick press,” he said.

He explained that there were two workers needed to run the machine, one on each side. The operator ran the press. The helper worked alongside him. Four bricks came out at a time, and on a busy day, the crew could load 28 cars.

“I was getting $3.23 an hour to be the helper,” he said. “And when they bumped you up to the guy on the other side, the operator, it was $3.25. Big, big bucks in those days!”

Each and every brick made by this press had to be manually removed from the machine. No automation here! (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The machinery has fallen silent, but the stories are still there.

Flegel carries them with him, moving from one machine to the next, remembering the people who had worked them and the lives that had unfolded inside these walls.

There was the story of the wheelers, who were paid by the ton to empty the kilns and haul the bricks away by wheelbarrow. Usually, three men worked together and split the tonnage between them.

One worker, Flegel remembered, wasn’t pulling his weight.

“One day they said ‘Okay, if you don’t do it we’re throwing you in the dugout.’”

They weren’t kidding.

“One guy grabbed him by the one side of the leg and the arm. They were going to go throw him in!”

They had almost made it to the water’s edge when the foreman appeared. They dropped him and walked away.

Apparently, the close call was punishment enough. The worker took the hint and picked up the pace.

While the Claybank Brick Plant itself is no longer safe for visitors, the interpretive centre and cafe are open to curious passersby. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

There were stories from the lunchroom, too.

Flegel said men came from Avonlea, Spring Valley and Bayard for work, and in a place where everyone knew everyone, there wasn’t much that stayed secret for long.

“They always say like women gossip, right?” Flegel asked with a laugh. “Well, the men have nothing over on them because the men were just as bad.”

The calendar in the Claybank Brick Plant still rests on March of 1989, when production within the factory came to a screeching halt. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The long hours spent at the factory weren’t all fun and games.

Coal arrived in open-topped gondola cars, and workers had to climb out into whatever Saskatchewan’s notoriously unpredictable weather had decided to throw at them that day.

“It was either windier than heck, cold as blazes, or a combination of both.”

There were no masks. When the workers came back inside, Flegel said, “all you could see was your eyeballs.”

It was hard work. Dirty work. Sometimes dangerous work.

And Flegel remembers it in details that no plaque or display case could ever quite capture.

Year after year, Dan Flegel watches the Claybank Brick Factory — and all the history it holds — slowly crumble away. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Claybank isn’t just a collection of old buildings.

It’s a National Historic Site and Provincial Heritage Property, recognized for the significance of its industrial history and for being one of the best surviving examples of an early brick manufacturing plant in Canada.

In 1992 the facility was donated to the Saskatchewan government, which accepted it through the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation.

But ownership has created a funding problem. Because the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation owns the plant, the community group working to preserve it can’t turn to the foundation’s usual heritage grants for help.

As a result, the historic factory is now under lock and key, surrounded by fencing.

The Claybank Brick Plant has been recognized as both a National Historic Site and Provincial Heritage Property. Despite those designations, the Claybank Brick Plant Historical Society has been told there is no funding available to preserve or restore the buildings. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Flegel remembers a not-too-distant past when the buildings were open. When the machinery could be demonstrated. When the plant was being looked after.

He was part of that work.

Between 2000 and 2005, Flegel helped put roofs on many of the buildings. He remembers what Claybank looked like then.

“There wasn’t a single weed in here,” he reflected. “Like this was kept almost spotless.”

When he looks around now, the difference is impossible to miss.

“In a way, it’s sad,” Flegel said. “Because you can see the degradation, and every year it gets obviously a little bit worse.”

Hundreds of hand molds still sit within the Claybank Brick Plant. These were used to create custom, uniquely shaped bricks for specific projects. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Then he gets to the part that worries him most.

“The worst is water. Once water gets in, then everything goes to heck.”

There is no dramatic moment when a historic building disappears. It happens slowly.

A roof gives way. A wall takes on water. A piece of machinery rusts. Another winter passes.

And then, one day, a place that once welcomed visitors with open arms isn’t safe to enter anymore.

Restoration is one thing. Preservation is another. Keeping a place like Claybank standing is a whole other beast.

The heat from the kilns didn’t go to waste. It was routed through tunnels into a building housing racks of bricks that required drying, substantially speeding up production time. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The National Trust for Canada put Claybank on its 2025 list of Canada’s most endangered historic places, pointing to the site’s deteriorating condition and the lack of a sustainable long-term funding model.

Which leaves a pretty simple question hanging over these buildings: what happens to a National Historic Site when there isn’t enough money to keep it standing?

Flegel has been asked versions of that question for years.

People have wondered why something isn’t being done. Why, if this place is so important, it is being allowed to deteriorate.

He understands why they feel that way. He feels it too.

“I don’t know what the answer is, to be honest,” he said.

Then comes the practical reality.

“But there’s no money.”

This was once a busy factory. These days, it’s an eerily quiet structure on the verge of collapse. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The Claybank Brick Plant has survived fire, war, changing industries and the disappearance of the market that built it.

Now it is fighting something much quieter.

Time.

And the question of whether anyone will be able to keep the doors standing long enough for the next generation to walk through them.