By Magdolene Dykstra
Goole Earth Image of the Phillips Red Art mine in Ohio
Google Map of the Phillips Red Art mine in Madison Township, Ohio
Over 300 million years ago, this iron-rich clay accumulated in a prehistoric lakebed carved out by glacial movement. During that time, this area, now called Ohio, oscillated between lake, swamp, and dry land. The ebb and flow of water deposited layers of plant and water life, as well as various types of stone.[1] This is how the material that we call Redart slowly gathered: strata by strata, each layer encasing the memory of prehistoric life.
The earliest people to work with the material we call Redart were the “Adena” people. This was not how they identified themselves. Their true name has been lost. White settlers assigned the name “Adena” to the Indigenous peoples who lived in the Scioto River and Hocking Valleys in southern Ohio during the Early Woodland Period, about 2,000 years ago. From monumental burial mounds to the grooves carved into ceramic vessels, the Adena left subtle traces of themselves on the land. Both the Adena and Hopewell cultivated crops here, including squash, sunflower, and tobacco. And they shaped the ground: after collecting and refining the red clay, they mixed crushed stone into the smooth body to prevent cracking. The Adena produced thick-walled, wide-mouthed vessels. Some of these vessels they left unadorned, others they decorated with cord markings.[2]
Oak Hill, Ohio: home of the Cedar Heights Clay Company. A place shaped by ancient hydraulic and geologic forces, as well as by the more recent sweep of colonialism and the Anthropocene. Oak Hill is a village located in a valley that was once sculpted by glaciers. In the early 1800s, white settlers began to occupy this region, which is the ancestral land of the Kaskaskia, Osage, Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), Myaamia, Adena, and Hopewell peoples.[3] In 1872, settlers discovered the clay that the Adena and Hopewell had used long before them. Cedar Heights Clay was formed in 1924. Today, this company continues to mine the rolling hills around Oak Hill, where the only trace of the ancient lakebed are small ponds sprinkled amidst wood and farmland. The mines form a semi-elliptical pattern, arching toward the east. In the early years, “Redart” and its paler, more plastic cousin, “Goldart,” were dug by manual labor. Miners extracted these ancient sediments by hand, and mules and oxen deposited them anew elsewhere, to be processed.[4]
These days, Redart mining starts up in spring, once the winter snow has melted. Any water that lingers in the open pit of the mine is pumped out. A haul road is established to make way for the heavy machinery used to access the clay deposits. Rock and soil are bulldozed or blasted away. As one pit is made, another pit is filled: the unwanted material from an active mine is poured into the void of an exhausted one, over which trees and vegetation slowly creep back in. The Redart mining pits typically run between 25 and 110 feet deep—an inversion, perhaps, of the Adena’s burial mounds. A dozer drives its blade into the compacted sediment: its metal teeth and track marks are the first patterned impressions inscribed in this clay.
After millions of years of accumulation and slow weathering, the material we call Redart is moved to a processing plant a few miles away. First, it is categorized into piles. Next, it is crushed, artificially dried, and milled to a homogenous particle size. Once refined, it is neatly packed into 50-pound bags to be sold for industry or creative use throughout North America. Some of this clay, so used to bearing the weight of slow-forming depositional layers, will go on to bear another, more erective, type of weight: the weight of bricks and buildings.
[1] https://ohiodnr.gov/static/documents/geology/GF23_DOGS_2014.pdf
[2] https://resources.ohiohistory.org/omeka/items/show/469
[4] https://www.rescoproducts.com/resources/article-detail/cedar-heights-clay
Google map of the Cedar Heights Red Art plant