Spring 2017 Update
We continued last year's tour of forgotten potteries, beginning with a re-visit to McNicol, but then moved on to Warwick in Wheeling and then headed into Ohio.
Check it out:
River Hopping 2017 |
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Digging
The Carr China Company was built in 1916 by Thomas Carr on the bank of the Tygart River* in Grafton, West Virginia, and made vitrified commercial china. Production continued until the fateful day in July 1952 when company owner Wheeler Bachman took exception to the news that his employees were considering unionizing, and he abruptly ordered the plant closed. Fourteen years later, on July 16 and 17, 1966, the abandoned plant burned.
After the building burned it became an attractive nuisance for vagrants and children and it was eventually bulldozed, except for the floor and one remaining portion of a wall. The rubble was left and the site became a dumping area for some local residents.
With the news that the lead-contaminated, nine-acre site was slated for cleanup*, a small group gathered there in October 2009 to walk among the remains -- the factory's back wall, thousands of bricks, stilts, undecorated bisque-fired shards and high-fired decorated shards, and saggars strewn over the overgrown property. And they spent some time digging, too -- hoping to find any treasures or clues to Carr's past hidden deep in the layers of ash and rocks and mud on the Tygart's hilly bank.
Trucks began hauling off the top layer of shards on Oct. 20, 2009, in preparation for the site cleanup -- thought to involve scraping off four feet of dirt from the entire parcel of land. Workers cut down trees that had grown up on the plant site and took down the plant walls.
Two surveyors spent a day at the site on March 18, 2010, and said their work was in preparation for the final cleanup later on in the spring.
On Oct. 13, 2010, three 18-wheelers were spotted hauling pottery remains from the Carr site. They were thought to be headed to serve as landfill for a roadbed near Forman, W.V. -- and encapsulated in concrete.
Three slideshows illustrate the dig. The first, below, shows the general lay of the land on the Carr property. The second shows some of the shards. The third shows the property in March 2010 after the Fall 2009 cleanup and a few artifacts from that dig. The fourth includes photos taken by EPA employees as their work progressed. (All photos copyrighted by their owners: Helen Cutshaw, Sherri Harris, Susan Phillips.)
Notes
* The wikipedia indicates that the river that went by many monikers -- including Muddy River -- was formally named Tygart River in 1902 and its named was changed in 1950 to Tygart Valley River.
Click here to read a health consultation report prepared for the site (identified as EPA Facility ID WVN000306608) by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources in August 2009.
Digging in West Virginia, Pennsylvania & Ohio
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