Waning years of Clay City tumultuous

“Absentee ownership never works. People assume you don’t want it anymore.” These are words of advice from Jeff Linstad, manufacturing engineer for Mutual Materials, who oversaw the demolition of Clay City.

Houlahan holds one of the last bricks made in Clay City.

The plant made its last brick in January of 1994, but it was not completely demolished until September of 2003, and during the ensuing years, it underwent a variety of interesting unauthorized uses.

 “When we shut the plant down, we didn’t realize what people would do,” Mutual Materials President Gary Houlahan said. “We couldn’t afford to keep someone there for security, and some crazy things happened.”

The text reads: This “MUTUAL USED” brick represents the last firing of Kiln-7, Batch #403 at the Clay City Brick Plant on January 19, 1994. Made by members of the Aluminum, Brick and Glass Workers International Union Local #868 AKA “The Clay City Crew.”

Company personnel tried to secure the site by putting up signs and fences. Initially, they couldn’t close the Clay City Road because it was a dedicated county right of way, but Linstad hired a company to make a chain link fence to completely surround the plant the year it closed. “It cost us $24,000,” he said. “Thieves came in and took every last link of that fence.”

Then, Houlahan said, “Some enterprising fellows set up a meth lab in one of the buildings there. They weren’t particularly bright though, because hunters and a lot of people were still walking through that area, and somebody reported them to the police.”

This photo of a kiln from the Dispatch shows that the plant was still in

 decent condition in 1996, as large scale unauthorized salvage

 operations had not yet begun.

According to an account in the August 21, 1996, Eatonville Dispatch, a nearby property owner had earlier confronted one of the young men who was wearing camouflage gear and holding a shotgun. The property owner told the man he shouldn’t be on the property, and when the intruder didn’t respond, the neighbor called the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office. Twenty officers showed up and found three men in the final stages of producing a batch of methamphetamine.

Around the same time, a former employee at the brickyard formulated rumors that the clay mines contained gold. He started an organization that advertised tours to this gold-rich land. Paying customers would dig up clay and take it down to the river to pan for gold. What they didn’t know is that the organizer  had sprinkled small amounts of gold dust in the bottom of the pans, enough to keep the customers interested but not enough to cut into the enterprise’s profits. Once Mutual Materials heard about the scheme, they forced it to shut down.

The meth lab and gold mine didn’t end the illicit activities at Clay City, though. The buildings were still mostly intact, and while the furniture had been removed by Mutual Materials, valuable items remained in the walls and machines for someone experienced in salvage operations.

“After that, a group of professional thieves came in and changed the lock on the gate,” Houlahan explained. “They would open it up during the day and steal everything of value—copper wire and copper from the radiators, especially, but also fixtures, doors, lumber—anything on the buildings they could tear apart and sell. They were operating on a regular 40-hour work week. During daylight hours, they’d drive their trucks in and go to work. At the end of the day, they’d lock the gate back up until the next morning. It was kind of funny, in a sad sort of way.”

Some of the vandalism of the plant can be seen

 in this photo from Jeff Linstad of Mutual Materials.

Besides the professional thieves, there were also hunters and mischief makers who shot buildings to pieces.

“There had always been a shooting problem there,” Linstad said. “The plant managers would call and tell us that hunters were setting up salt licks within 100 feet of the plant to attract the deer for easy kills.” But the problem escalated after plant closure. “The school bus driver didn’t want to drive the bus past the gate because kids on the bus might be hit by stray bullets,” Linstad said.

“People shot their names in bullet holes in the roof of the clay shed,” Houlahan said. “They’d shoot at some areas repeatedly to try to make small holes bigger.” Some of the destruction was also done, apparently, by sledgehammers, with vandals breaking apart brick smoke stacks and pillars in expectation of watching them tumble down, though from photos Linstad took of the damage,  rebar usually  prevented brick walls from falling.

This 2003 photo from Linstad shows the dismantling and leveling of the plant.

Mutual Materials realized that the only way to discourage thieves and trespassers was to completely dismantle the plant and level the site, which it completed in 2003. The company was able to recover and sell the pug mill, the machine that actually made the bricks, because it was too heavy for thieves to salvage. Now nature has taken over and traces of Clay City are slowly disappearing. The company did some logging on the site from 2004 through 2008 and then considered converting it to a rock quarry. However, roads to the site are not ideal and would have been too expensive to upgrade. Also its distance from metropolitan areas is a problem. In 2011, Mutual Materials put the 416-acres site up for sale.
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For more info about Clay City, see my other two articles:
Memories of Clay City are fading
Traces of Clay City today are scarse

A visitor has tagged the inside of the gate that bars to road to Clay City with an epitaph.