Map  of the HC Spinks Clay Company in Gleason Tennessee.  The HC Spinks and Kentucky Tennessee Ball Clay companies are both located in this region on the Kentucky/Tennessee border.   As you zoom out on the map you can find multiple clay mine locations throughout the region.  

Around 50 million years ago, in the warm, wet climate of the early Eocence, small mammals were emerging from the safety of forests and evolving into the ancestors of the modern pig, camel, horse, and rhinoceros.  Whale skeletons from the same time still bear the features – a hip bone, hind legs, and specialized teeth – of their land-dwelling ancestors.  At about this same time the Ball Clays of Kentucky and Tennessee were completing their own long journey, arriving at their present location on the flat plains surrounding the Gulf of Mexico.  

In a sense, clays are the remnants of ancient mountains.  The slow work of water gravity and time decomposes granite into its constituent parts: quartz, iron, feldspar, and finally the mineral kaolinite.   Tiny particles of kaolinite mix with water, flowing downhill in streams and rivers and, in the case of the ball clay deposits of Kentucky and Tennessee, eventually settled in coastal lagoons.  The ball clays of this region are the vestiges of these prehistoric pools.  

Ball clays were given their name because of their plasticity.  This sticky clay was once literally rolled out of the mine in large balls.   Ball clays are a relatively pure form of kaolinite, containing little iron or quartz, but often significant quantities of organic matter.  The carbon-based material can give ball clay a grey of even black color, which burns away during firing, leaving a strong white ceramic.   

Around 1000BCE the first potters of western Tennessee began to shape the regions clay into vessels.  Over the next 3000 years Chickasaw pottery developed increasingly complex and sophisticated forms, which both mirrored and supported the development of the culture as a whole.  When the first European colonists arrived, western Tennessee was populated by a vibrant Chickasaw society with permanent towns, a developed economy, and extensive trade networks.   

It took only 65 years from the English proclamation of 1763 – which recognized the complete ownership of the land of this region by native people – until the forced removal of the Chickasaw population by the US Government. This violent displacement culminated with the “Indian Removal Act” of 1830, only 30 years before the beginning of modern ball clay mining near the town of Paris Tennessee.   

In 1860 one displaced population had been largely replaced by another.  Approximately 1 in 4 people living in the state Tennessee at this time were enslaved Africans.  This population was even more concentrated in the middle and west of the state, where pure ball clays were interspersed with rich soils that could bear labor intensive crops including tobacco and cotton.  

In the 1860’s Ball Clay was mined in Tennessee for use by local potteries.  Today these same Ball Clays are distributed throughout North America, not only used in the production of pottery but also the industrial manufacturing of tile and sanitaryware.  Ball clays of this region are mined by two main companies: H.C Spinks (a subsidiary of the German company, Lhoist) and Kentucky Tennessee Ball Clay (owned by the multinational industrial mineral company Imerys).  The industrial Ball Clays we use today are blended from clay from multiple locations throughout the area, to achieve the homogenous consistency required by industry.  The 160 year history modern clay mining – from 1860 until today – is still only a moment in comparison with the 2000 year pottery history of the native Chickasaw pottery, and only a heartbeat in lifetime of the material, since its birth in the primordial lagoons along the gulf of Mexico.