The Clay Turned Yellow

Did you know? A rich deposit of fire clay was discovered in 1866 on Warrior Ridge in Porter Township, on land owned by Samuel Hatfield of the Juniata Iron Works. As the ironworks became less profitable in the 1870s, Hatfield began developing his fire clay mine, and by 1883 he had ten men working it.

In 1885 John N. Hatfield and John Phillips bought clay deposits in Logan Township, near Petersburg, and turned their attention there, because the abandonment of the Pennsylvania Canal had made shipping from the Porter Township site difficult. Their tipple near the Petersburg railroad station is prominent in photographs of that area from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Then the work came back to Porter Township. Research by Jean Harshbarger, a member of the Phillips family, suggests the Porter Township quarry was reopened after the railroad was built to Alexandria in 1900, and the storage silos and sheds stood close to the tracks. Ted Schirm, the longtime foreman at the Porter Township operation, was told that the move from Petersburg came when the clay there "turned yellow," a sign of a change in the quality of the deposit. He said the company's Logan Township buildings were taken down and their materials reused to put up the Porter Township works.

There the clay was processed for use as refractory mortar: calcined at 2,600 degrees in a rotary dryer fired by a hard coal stoker, then pulverized. It was shipped in bags or in bulk to steel mills and other industrial customers. The operation was abandoned in 1976.

Checked 2026-10-30 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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