Clayburn Village

siride May 27, 2022

Not only was I 'West of the 5th' last week, I was West of the 6th and 7th too! Everything happened last minute and we headed off for a short trip out to Victoria, BC stopping at various points along the way and back.

I decided to look up ghost towns (BC has some great ones) but only 1 was near where we happened to be. Turned out to not be a ghost town at all but a little village with some history. Enough history that it was designated for conservation as a Heritage Site in 1996.

Welcome to Clayburn, British Columbia, at the foot of the Sumas Mountains. Info from the village website states that Clayburn was the first 'company town' in BC.

They Clayburn Company made bricks from the high grade of clay found in the Sumas Mountains. The factory built in 1905, was dismantled/destroyed in 1931 with scaled back operations continuing at a sister factory, Kilgard, further up the mountain. Clayburn's last local brick making facility closed in 2011.

During its heyday, not only did Clayburn make standard coloured bricks but they made buff coloured and specialty bricks. This made them sought after by architects and contractors for their originality. Clayburn bricks can be seen in many prominent buildings in Vancouver and Victoria built before WWI. During the 1920's the 'new wing' of the famous Empress Hotel in Victoria was built using Clayburn bricks. (The Empress deserves it's own post, it has fascinated me since I was a kid).

Not much remains of the original Clayburn brick works now (that I could see) except what looks like part of a wall, some ovens and pieces of brick embedded in the path way. The village itself has a quaint atmosphere with nice brick houses and lovely gardens. About half the original homes, a store, the church and the schoolhouse remain. The church and school are on the historic register of Canada.