I live In Iowa and my family farm has several places with different colored clay. Yellow grayish, blue grey, green grey and a brick red colored. One day i discovered this weird mold...and was informed it was for bricks. Apparently with the clay deposits on the property, back in the day, my family made and sold bricks. I even found some while cleaning out a flower bed dated from the end of the 1800s.
So true. Had to put in a new septic system at my house, didn’t think it would be too bad because it’s all sand here. Turns out there’s a layer of clay about 6 feet down. So that was fun digging the last 3 or 4 feet of septic tank hole in that.
OMG. I live on an island in the Detroit River. There is freaking clay everywhere. Can’t dig down 3 inches without digging into it. The Detroit downriver area is full of clay. My clay professor used to take people out to excavation sites for new houses and take up the clay from the machines that would dig the basement lol
We used to make little bowls from clay we found at the creek, when I was a kid. The feel was so silky. Not sure we appreciated how lucky we were to have it.
My grandmother was a potter. Her works are on exhibition in the village she lived in this weekend. Glad to see you cover this topic. Cheers from Hungary
Our area has heavy red clay soil, but the huge clay deposits in the creek are gray and high quality,free of debris. Summer fun is had while tubing; we stop and cover ourselves with the wonderful clay and let it dry. ‘Float by beauty bars’
@@winfieldjohnson125 Did you understand what they meant? This is a youtube comment section, not a textbook (although I think most textbooks aren't even that pedantic)
@@gearandalthefirst7027 Lol, I guess I had that coming....By way of explanation; My Mother was an English teacher back when you were expected to actually learn in school. I can get touchy about these things.
Jon, as an Australian, and therefore someone from a country with the reputation of having some of the most dangerous animals on Earth living there, I would like to offer you a small, but very important piece of advice. Under no circumstances should fingers be inserted into small, unknown holes in the ground.
A crawfish hole isn't particularly dangerous. Noodling for catfish can be though. Our most dangerous fauna are rattlesnakes and snapping turtles. Well, bobcats, but those are rare.
@@MyBoomStick1 You're never safe anywhere there are snakes. I live in Ohio, we've got pretty similar wildlife to Indiana and we absolutely have venomous snakes and spiders and turtles that will easily take your finger off and small animals that WILL bite you, rabies is also very real. You're never completely safe in the wild like that, no matter where you are
I would have to agree with the comments above from the wonderful country of Australia, and from the great state of Ohio. Disagree with Indiana. You have cow tipping there. Very dangerous. And just forget about the desert SW of USA, with scorpions, centipedes, and their other friends.. Sadly, this is where the great videos of this channel meets with the 21 century. If no one visits there often, there are probably other reasons. Proudly from the great state of Illinois.
I live in south west Pennsylvania and there's a bunch of old furnaces around from the early 1800's where they made glass. Sometimes you'll be in the mountains and just stumble across one.
I'm from the same area! There are certainly a lot of good deposits around and I've run into some old work areas too. Fascinating to think about what it was like
there's a couple towns left in the area named after the furnaces they were built near too, the old iron, glass, and ceramics furnaces you find sometimes get preserved in parks but usually its just a mysterious weird chimney of stone forgotten in the middle of the woods and we always got yelled at not to go near em. its fun explaining to people not from the area why so many places have "furnace" included in the name between the ancient colonial industries and the coal and coke works everywhere.
The cinematography in this video is stellar! The reflection of sky on water, the leaves on stream bed. I feel like I just had a nice walk in the woods with my friend Jon 🌳🌳😊🌳🌳
Yep, we have a *lot* of clay here in Kansas. Great for pottery, not so great for gardening. I remember my neighbor looking at the soil in my little garden patch as I complained about all the clay. He informed me it was "good black soil" and I should be glad to have it. I never did get him to understand that it wasn't "good black soil," it was "heavy, badly needing more organic matter and some sand, pain in the butt for gardening, black clay". I even showed him how it balled up when squeezed and he informed me that all good soil did that. Poor guy had never gardened in his life, but he was an expert in his own mind. There's a brick factory about 30 miles west of where I live that has been making bricks out of local clay for generations. Not far from where they dig the clay for bricks is a salt mine, also formed by that shallow inland sea that deposited all that clay.
I live in Kansas this is accurate, at least in Eastern Kansas. If you try refining the clay your leftover material is much closer to being good soil. Raised beds are a great option if you don't need large amounts of refined clay.
knowing the land and exploring it in ways most folks never realize, such as studying soil composition add tree varieties is always fascinating. I grew up in the woods and found most people never notice all the subtle differences around them. frontier pottery sounds pretty cool, and the pieces you guys offer are quite nice.
The positive vibe of your videos always makes me feel good. Thank you for sharing your experiences and the history and skills involved with so much passion and love!
In my youngling days, my great-grandmother once took me to my great-great-grandfather's clay source and showed it off with great pride. I hadn't the sense to appreciate it back then, but I do now.
If You're ever in Fredericksburg, Va., let me know. I know a spot on the Rappahannock river her that has TONS of near commercial grade artist clay. A lot of artist here know about it. The stuff goes several feet deep just under the water surface (often only inches deep in summer), easy to harvest.
@@not_your_raccoon Be damned careful. They're is old rebar from the old dam they blew up in the early 2000s. Don't want in if the water isn't clear as glass. That garbage will impale you. Stay upstream from the historic marker at the old dam site.
@@Eezyriderr1 oh wow wasn’t expecting it that far upstream, but the dam being there for a century… it makes sense. Found some pics of the sediment there after they blew it. Fascinating. Thank you for the warning
@@not_your_raccoon Yeah man. From the traffic circle on Fall Him it's about 1 mile, just past the old dam. The crib dam was there since about 1867-8, then the Embry dam replaced it. Plenty of time for the kind of sediment that forms clay.
You want plenty of easily accessible, thick clay? Come to NE Ohio, specifically to the suburbs of Cleveland. Pick any patch of ground and dig down a few inches. Underneath that, you'll find as much thick, smooth clay as you could ever use. Please, take as much as you want...!
I was just in Taos on a day trip and I saw how cool the adobe buildings were including the church of san francisco de Asis and how every year they have to apply the adobe mixture and I was wondering if you would touch on frontier life in the southwest in the 18th century.
I helped dig a footing for the short side of a barn. It was 20 foot long 18 in wide 18 in deep, the area I was tasked to excavate was clay once you got 6 inches in...thick pure clay. A potters dream.... I took me two days with a shovel, pickax and wheel barrel.
I live south of you, Jon, along White River and Indian Creek. Lots of wonderful clays of several different types. In fact, there were at least 5 different potteries in a town called Shoals, about 15 miles south of me. The flood of 1913 put an end to most of them.
Seeing you walk through the woods like that raises an interesting question from me. Where colonists really that good at picking out and avoiding poison ivy in the underbrush? It seems I get it every time I end up walking through woods.
Another wonderful video, Jon. So informative and educational. I truly have so much respect for what you are doing. You took an idea and ran with it and look at the success. Congratulations on a job more than well done.
I feel like this is important to learn about. Clay is so essential. For bricks bowls plates. Stoves/ ovens its extremely heat ristant and ceramic is incredibly durable. I appreciate the video.
I have never clicked a video so fast! The more I get into pottery the more I am interested in harvesting wild clay and doing my own pit firings. It's such a deep rabbit hole to fall down in!
I live on the remnant of a Great Lakes glacial ridge with multiple springs and a creek not too far downhill. It doesn't take long when digging to get beyond topsoil to a grey layer and yellow layer. I also have a home kiln as a ceramicist so I'm especially interested in whether it's usable for something. Primitive birding stones were found on the property and the one I still have looks and feels fired, but whether it was made here I have no idea. Thanks for sharing this video. It's very interesting.
The town/area I live in used to be completely covered in a swamp in the 18th century, but they dug some streams out to drain it. I noticed when remodeling my yard that there is a massive amount of clay, just about a foot underground.
I grew up in Michigan and there's a river that empties into Lake Michigan in South Haven that has a hugeeeee deposit of clay. It's a grey clay but it's high quality and I couldn't help but take some home. Wild clay is great!
Super enjoyed this adventure,, and learning about stream eddies and clay deposition. Can't wait to hear more. Remember doing exactly this as a kid, looking for clay in the walls of streams. It was always exciting to find it. Usually a deep gray and slick.
Bonus Saturday episode! 😍 Wild Clay hunting even better for this geologist! I loved every second! laughing at much I was geeking out on the clays you were finding. Great descriptions of depositional environments!
One of the most common ways to discover clay was when you buried someone. Different soil strata can occur fairly close to the surface. After a foot or 2 of digging you may find glacial till or pure fine clay with no rocks. It was something to note. Burials happened quite often in the New World and they may have discovered useful soil quickly that way. BTW the tree is a huge factor in preventing streambank erasion...
Just head over to Claypool, Indiana!! Jokes aside, thanks for all you do! It would be so difficult to make sense of the old cookery texts and such without a visual guide.
did this myself recently, without any real knowledge... i just knew a species of plant that loves swampy areas, and i figured there must be a rather pure layer of clay for the area to be this swampy all year long... so i dug about 3 feet, and et voila pure grey clay, just contaminated with a few rocks and sand, but with actual chunks of pure grey clay that brake apart like pure clay does... in this kinda tacky way.. the plant i knew is known as "himalayan balsam" this stuff grows everywhere here but the area i choose to dig was a large field of it with dead trees in between.
Doggone Friend! You ran me nuts standing by that broken limb by the Creek! I always make an effort to snap off this kind of sharp eye-level branches-maybe save someone from poking out their eye some day...
My grandparents house had a hand dug cellar that was clay. I occasionally used some of it when I was young but we never fired it. I never thought much about why it was clay. At the time, the area that we lived in was almost entirely sand, so going to Grandma's house was noticably different.
More than fifty years ago, my Junior High School Art Teacher brought in a big lump of off-white stuff ((if the light hit it right it was actually a very faint blue). She broke it down, saturated it with water and strained it through a pair of nylon stockings. It produced some nice looking clay. I think she used it for pouring into a mold.
In Virginia, if you dig a hole anywhere you hit red clay. We have almost no topsoil except in bottom land. The bricks for Monticello came from the soil excavated from the basement.
This video reminds me a lot of the show Survivorman, with the self-filming, the walk through the woods, and the expertise of finding what you need in nature.
Going to go dig some grey river clay after supper, stumbled onto a nice deposit, will be easy to process. I took a large coffee can of sandy soil from the same river a year ago and practiced separating the clay from the soil, made a fired little change dish out of it
@1:30 That wide field between two hills would have been a beaver pond in the 18th century. Beavers slowed water enough that the sediment fell out of solution and created those wide valleys. Valleys on which were later built the farms and towns of the 18th century and onward. Bring back the beavers!
That looks like you may be able to find some flour gold there. It will settle on dense clay layers as well as bedrock.so find a few friends to process what you dig up, getting to the clay . That would be cool and interesting seeing a bunch of old shaker boxes and long Tom's made from wood ,on site.
I’ve been wanting to use some clay from around me here in Tennessee for a while now, this might have finally goaded me into digging some up and throwing it in the kiln!
Thanks for another excellent quality video. I would also like to know how they made glaze for pottery, in the 18th century, in North America. I'm sure you will cover that subject at some point. Cheers!
I wish you were in Missouri. We hit some clay East of KC that I think you would love and I’d give you as much as you could take. Great video love you guys!👍
I remember digging holes as a kid and finding _massive_ chunks of beautiful bright orange clay all the time, I thought that's what all dirt was just like. I lived near Vermillion, Ohio, which was named after the same clay deposits that are a beautiful vermillion color. Even living like 20 minutes away now, the soil isn't the same
Here in my local area of Ky, its easy to find a white or red clay in creeks and lake edges. There's a 500 acre place called 'Red Banks'. Only scrub will grow because of the super high clay content. It took my uncle 4 years ro get a patch conditioned for a garden!
Around our area to find clay all you have to do is walk anywhere between the two mountains and look down at your feet. We have two types lighter tan and medium grey clays. If you happen to hit the rare area with dark rich soil from the forest just dig down a foot or so and there is the clay again. The stream that cuts through the mountains deposited the clays over the years. When I was a kid, I used to make plates, cups and mugs to play with and ashtrays for my parents to use out of clay. Now that I am an adult, I curse it because I'm trying to grow a garden in it these days.
I remember finding a large clay deposit on the shore of the Connecticut river around deerfield. I wonder how many people came down to get clay over the years.
We had clay deposits on our farm in Dover NH, and it was said that years ago there was a small brick mill near the brook. It was only a foundation hole scattered around with bricks in my lifetime. And you can see where the land was dug out in areas. We would dig the clay and play with it when we were kids. And a few miles away was the town of Gonic. Short for the Indian name Squannamagonic. I think it means land between the waters. There was a huge brick yard there that operated into the 1980’s.
Best to have a iron rod that is the same as what's used to hunt bog iron, when you can slowly push the probe slowly down through the top layer you know a thick sticky patch of clay lies below.
The funny part is you can take almost any dirt, soak it and wash away everything but the clay. There's almost always clay in dirt, just far less in certain areas. If you find an area with some clay around odds are the "regular dirt" around it will hold a decent amount of clay too. Here in Northern California our dirt is almost as red as Australia's and has a very high amount of clay which when separated becomes the classic adobe... hence there's an adobe/terracotta factory 20 miles from me in Lincoln.
You should come to Oklahoma. You can literally just reach over to the banks and scoop out a big handful of red fine silty clay. You can pull wheel barrows of it out.
I live In Iowa and my family farm has several places with different colored clay. Yellow grayish, blue grey, green grey and a brick red colored.
One day i discovered this weird mold...and was informed it was for bricks. Apparently with the clay deposits on the property, back in the day, my family made and sold bricks. I even found some while cleaning out a flower bed dated from the end of the 1800s.
Can't speak for everybody else but I enjoy the "behind the scenes"material gathering and sourcing from the time period.
Same here. But not for $10/month
The easiest way to find clay in our area is start digging post holes for a new fence. Guaranteed to find more than you want. :)
So true. Had to put in a new septic system at my house, didn’t think it would be too bad because it’s all sand here. Turns out there’s a layer of clay about 6 feet down. So that was fun digging the last 3 or 4 feet of septic tank hole in that.
When he said, "Thank you for coming along as we..." I was really waiting for, "savor the flavors and aromas of... woods... dirt."
@CreekDweller
Clay is very rich in vitamins, minerals, and other harder to get nutrients.
eating clay is not good it isn't digestible and is folk lore that can kill.
@@GravesRWFiA PICA! Yummy. 🚫
Purifying clay by gravity separation is certainly an acquired skill, let alone doing it by sifting through a mesh.
OMG. I live on an island in the Detroit River. There is freaking clay everywhere. Can’t dig down 3 inches without digging into it. The Detroit downriver area is full of clay. My clay professor used to take people out to excavation sites for new houses and take up the clay from the machines that would dig the basement lol
"Clay professor", what a wonderful title! Life goal for sure 😊 I can only call myself a clay amateur 😅
We used to make little bowls from clay we found at the creek, when I was a kid. The feel was so silky. Not sure we appreciated how lucky we were to have it.
My daughter just did that a few weeks ago. I'll have her watch the video and I'm sure she'll go back and revisit the site where she collected it.
That sounds like fun.
As kids we would make dice in the playground out of the clay lol
My brother's and I used to dig up clay in our back yards and build little castles/forts for our green army men.
My sister and I did that at a lake we used to go to!
My grandmother was a potter. Her works are on exhibition in the village she lived in this weekend. Glad to see you cover this topic. Cheers from Hungary
Greetings to a fellow hungarian!
Congrats for the exhibition!
@@balogh89 Szervusz! Köszi! :)
Why would they exhibit her works if she only lived there for a weekend? /s
@@brianhenrichs9409 We've been all wondering about that. Odd...
@Ben Kenobi May God bless you!
If there is wild clay, then there must be also tamed clay.
Surely pottery is the art of taming ?
My first thought too. Tame Clay then Wild Clay after a few drinks ... or, perhaps Dr. Jekyll and Mr Clay???
I was wondering, if he's hunting clay, can it hunt you? or is this where we get clay pigeons?
@@davidpettinger6350 …that makes sense on so many levels
The tame clay is what you buy in the store.
Our area has heavy red clay soil, but the huge clay deposits in the creek are gray and high quality,free of debris. Summer fun is had while tubing; we stop and cover ourselves with the wonderful clay and let it dry. ‘Float by beauty bars’
That sounds like Tennessee. Our other nickname should have been red clay state. lol
@@carrief1759nah, that belongs to North Carolina. Y’all are mostly nice though
I love how lovingly Jon speaks about this little river! Clay hunting sounds like a lot of fun!
That is NOT a river....A river is navigable.....Think about it.
@@winfieldjohnson125 Ok sorry, english is not my first language. Stream then, I guess
@@winfieldjohnson125 Did you understand what they meant? This is a youtube comment section, not a textbook (although I think most textbooks aren't even that pedantic)
@@gearandalthefirst7027 Lol, I guess I had that coming....By way of explanation; My Mother was an English teacher back when you were expected to actually learn in school. I can get touchy about these things.
Jon, as an Australian, and therefore someone from a country with the reputation of having some of the most dangerous animals on Earth living there, I would like to offer you a small, but very important piece of advice.
Under no circumstances should fingers be inserted into small, unknown holes in the ground.
A crawfish hole isn't particularly dangerous. Noodling for catfish can be though. Our most dangerous fauna are rattlesnakes and snapping turtles. Well, bobcats, but those are rare.
Depending on where you are, that advice is either useless OR can save your life. In Indiana he’s safe
Who or what bit you
@@MyBoomStick1 You're never safe anywhere there are snakes. I live in Ohio, we've got pretty similar wildlife to Indiana and we absolutely have venomous snakes and spiders and turtles that will easily take your finger off and small animals that WILL bite you, rabies is also very real. You're never completely safe in the wild like that, no matter where you are
I would have to agree with the comments above from the wonderful country of Australia, and from the great state of Ohio. Disagree with Indiana. You have cow tipping there. Very dangerous. And just forget about the desert SW of USA, with scorpions, centipedes, and their other friends.. Sadly, this is where the great videos of this channel meets with the 21 century. If no one visits there often, there are probably other reasons. Proudly from the great state of Illinois.
I live in south west Pennsylvania and there's a bunch of old furnaces around from the early 1800's where they made glass. Sometimes you'll be in the mountains and just stumble across one.
I'm from the same area! There are certainly a lot of good deposits around and I've run into some old work areas too. Fascinating to think about what it was like
there's a couple towns left in the area named after the furnaces they were built near too, the old iron, glass, and ceramics furnaces you find sometimes get preserved in parks but usually its just a mysterious weird chimney of stone forgotten in the middle of the woods and we always got yelled at not to go near em. its fun explaining to people not from the area why so many places have "furnace" included in the name between the ancient colonial industries and the coal and coke works everywhere.
lotta those old furnaces in central pa as well tho at least there they were mainly lime kilns
Townsend I don't think you have the faintest idea of how absolutely stoked I am to see a vid on the process of gathering artisinal clay.
I didn't realize it was possible to get this excited about the process of gathering clay.
I wish people would stop overusing the adjective "artisanal." Especially in areas where it does not apply.
@Cambron Gabaree Well, his name is really Jon, not John.
@@GeorgeMonet It's a trendy word right now. Sort of like "infused". It'll go away as soon as people get tired of it being overused.
@@GeorgeMonet Sorry I was just gathering artisanal vocabulary from the inner reaches of my brain folds :)
The cinematography in this video is stellar! The reflection of sky on water, the leaves on stream bed. I feel like I just had a nice walk in the woods with my friend Jon 🌳🌳😊🌳🌳
Just moved to Kansas, while trying to start a garden noticed our whole yard is a giant brick of clay!! The kids had fun making pottery 😜
Try making a raised garden box , that should be the easiest way to start. Best of luck in it. :)
Welcome home. Kansas is a good place to be.
Yep, we have a *lot* of clay here in Kansas. Great for pottery, not so great for gardening. I remember my neighbor looking at the soil in my little garden patch as I complained about all the clay. He informed me it was "good black soil" and I should be glad to have it. I never did get him to understand that it wasn't "good black soil," it was "heavy, badly needing more organic matter and some sand, pain in the butt for gardening, black clay". I even showed him how it balled up when squeezed and he informed me that all good soil did that. Poor guy had never gardened in his life, but he was an expert in his own mind. There's a brick factory about 30 miles west of where I live that has been making bricks out of local clay for generations. Not far from where they dig the clay for bricks is a salt mine, also formed by that shallow inland sea that deposited all that clay.
I live in Kansas this is accurate, at least in Eastern Kansas. If you try refining the clay your leftover material is much closer to being good soil. Raised beds are a great option if you don't need large amounts of refined clay.
Watch out!! There's a green plastic bucket stalking you!
knowing the land and exploring it in ways most folks never realize, such as studying soil composition add tree varieties is always fascinating. I grew up in the woods and found most people never notice all the subtle differences around them. frontier pottery sounds pretty cool, and the pieces you guys offer are quite nice.
The positive vibe of your videos always makes me feel good. Thank you for sharing your experiences and the history and skills involved with so much passion and love!
In my youngling days, my great-grandmother once took me to my great-great-grandfather's clay source and showed it off with great pride. I hadn't the sense to appreciate it back then, but I do now.
If You're ever in Fredericksburg, Va., let me know. I know a spot on the Rappahannock river her that has TONS of near commercial grade artist clay. A lot of artist here know about it. The stuff goes several feet deep just under the water surface (often only inches deep in summer), easy to harvest.
Right there🤣
Any chance you would give coordinates?
@@not_your_raccoon Be damned careful. They're is old rebar from the old dam they blew up in the early 2000s. Don't want in if the water isn't clear as glass. That garbage will impale you. Stay upstream from the historic marker at the old dam site.
@@Eezyriderr1 oh wow wasn’t expecting it that far upstream, but the dam being there for a century… it makes sense. Found some pics of the sediment there after they blew it. Fascinating. Thank you for the warning
@@not_your_raccoon Yeah man. From the traffic circle on Fall Him it's about 1 mile, just past the old dam. The crib dam was there since about 1867-8, then the Embry dam replaced it. Plenty of time for the kind of sediment that forms clay.
You want plenty of easily accessible, thick clay? Come to NE Ohio, specifically to the suburbs of Cleveland. Pick any patch of ground and dig down a few inches. Underneath that, you'll find as much thick, smooth clay as you could ever use. Please, take as much as you want...!
We had a beautiful blue clay deposit on the land where I grew up, it was so beautiful
I was just in Taos on a day trip and I saw how cool the adobe buildings were including the church of san francisco de Asis and how every year they have to apply the adobe mixture and I was wondering if you would touch on frontier life in the southwest in the 18th century.
Taos is awesome!
Interesting timing, I'm in the middle of processing my own batch of clay.
What kind of water do you use ? Rain ?
Awesome timing, I've been looking into wild clay recently.
Youll find me in the burbs
What is wild clay?
@CreekDweller thank you so much for the kind explanation.
@CreekDweller yep, I just moved and the soil in my new yard is very rich in clay. Can't wait to make bricks and pottery after processing some of it.
Hi from Syracuse NY brother and thank you for sharing your thoughts and adventures and history
I helped dig a footing for the short side of a barn. It was 20 foot long 18 in wide 18 in deep, the area I was tasked to excavate was clay once you got 6 inches in...thick pure clay. A potters dream.... I took me two days with a shovel, pickax and wheel barrel.
I live south of you, Jon, along White River and Indian Creek. Lots of wonderful clays of several different types. In fact, there were at least 5 different potteries in a town called Shoals, about 15 miles south of me. The flood of 1913 put an end to most of them.
Here in southeastern Wisconsin every small town has/had a clay pit. Their last use was for drain tiles.
Thanks Jon this is good information. In school we just got it from the bag on the table. I loved working with it.
Seeing you walk through the woods like that raises an interesting question from me. Where colonists really that good at picking out and avoiding poison ivy in the underbrush? It seems I get it every time I end up walking through woods.
Another wonderful video, Jon. So informative and educational. I truly have so much respect for what you are doing. You took an idea and ran with it and look at the success. Congratulations on a job more than well done.
I just found your channel a few days ago and I am SO glad! Thank you so much for making all of these videos.
I feel bad for Jon when he gets to the river, a mosquito flies to his forehead and I can't shake it off or warn him.
I know right? I wanted to warn that poor mosquito before it met the wrath of Jon. Hope it made it out ok.
@@ryanvasquez6427 he'd savor the flavors and aromas of death.
I feel like this is important to learn about. Clay is so essential. For bricks bowls plates. Stoves/ ovens its extremely heat ristant and ceramic is incredibly durable.
I appreciate the video.
What a delightful adventure! Thank you for bringing us along! 😊
Perfect timing!! Just been researching this subject so I can do my own pottery!
The best part is that he probably knew where all those deposits were beforehand, but he gave us several examples of places to look for clay.
Always a pleasure to watch. Always learning something new. Thanks for the content, and for the escape.
I have never clicked a video so fast! The more I get into pottery the more I am interested in harvesting wild clay and doing my own pit firings. It's such a deep rabbit hole to fall down in!
I live on the remnant of a Great Lakes glacial ridge with multiple springs and a creek not too far downhill. It doesn't take long when digging to get beyond topsoil to a grey layer and yellow layer. I also have a home kiln as a ceramicist so I'm especially interested in whether it's usable for something. Primitive birding stones were found on the property and the one I still have looks and feels fired, but whether it was made here I have no idea. Thanks for sharing this video. It's very interesting.
The mosquito on your forehead was killing me
I really do love your videos, so relaxing to watch, calms my anxiety.
Your brick making video is one of my favorites. Clay is so amazing! Ceramics in general are in our everyday life!
The town/area I live in used to be completely covered in a swamp in the 18th century, but they dug some streams out to drain it. I noticed when remodeling my yard that there is a massive amount of clay, just about a foot underground.
I grew up in Michigan and there's a river that empties into Lake Michigan in South Haven that has a hugeeeee deposit of clay. It's a grey clay but it's high quality and I couldn't help but take some home. Wild clay is great!
Super enjoyed this adventure,, and learning about stream eddies and clay deposition. Can't wait to hear more. Remember doing exactly this as a kid, looking for clay in the walls of streams. It was always exciting to find it. Usually a deep gray and slick.
Bonus Saturday episode! 😍 Wild Clay hunting even better for this geologist! I loved every second! laughing at much I was geeking out on the clays you were finding. Great descriptions of depositional environments!
This is exactly what I need today! A relaxing video.
One of the most common ways to discover clay was when you buried someone. Different soil strata can occur fairly close to the surface. After a foot or 2 of digging you may find glacial till or pure fine clay with no rocks. It was something to note. Burials happened quite often in the New World and they may have discovered useful soil quickly that way.
BTW the tree is a huge factor in preventing streambank erasion...
Befor excavating machinery burying people had its problems !
@@robertl.fallin7062
Thank heavens for heavy equipment!
Just head over to Claypool, Indiana!! Jokes aside, thanks for all you do! It would be so difficult to make sense of the old cookery texts and such without a visual guide.
did this myself recently, without any real knowledge...
i just knew a species of plant that loves swampy areas, and i figured there must be a rather pure layer of clay for the area to be this swampy all year long... so i dug about 3 feet, and et voila pure grey clay, just contaminated with a few rocks and sand, but with actual chunks of pure grey clay that brake apart like pure clay does... in this kinda tacky way..
the plant i knew is known as "himalayan balsam" this stuff grows everywhere here but the area i choose to dig was a large field of it with dead trees in between.
What a great share. Thank you John!
I am definitely strapping in for this journey!
Doggone Friend! You ran me nuts standing by that broken limb by the Creek! I always make an effort to snap off this kind of sharp eye-level branches-maybe save someone from poking out their eye some day...
I love that you’re still posting after all these years
Come around here in Williamsburg VA all we have is clay 😂
My grandparents house had a hand dug cellar that was clay. I occasionally used some of it when I was young but we never fired it.
I never thought much about why it was clay. At the time, the area that we lived in was almost entirely sand, so going to Grandma's house was noticably different.
The clay that I’ve found was always associated with shale. The shale could be split for multiple fossils of ferns and plants. Texas
More than fifty years ago, my Junior High School Art Teacher brought in a big lump of off-white stuff ((if the light hit it right it was actually a very faint blue). She broke it down, saturated it with water and strained it through a pair of nylon stockings. It produced some nice looking clay. I think she used it for pouring into a mold.
This is wonderful, thank you!
In Virginia, if you dig a hole anywhere you hit red clay. We have almost no topsoil except in bottom land. The bricks for Monticello came from the soil excavated from the basement.
I grew up on the Gulf Coast, and remember finding multiple colors in a river there. Blue, green, orange, red, you name it.
This is simply the best content on youtube.
the camera quality at 2:48 is stunning! the light is captured perfectly & its like a period piece, everything's so clear.
This video reminds me a lot of the show Survivorman, with the self-filming, the walk through the woods, and the expertise of finding what you need in nature.
Going to go dig some grey river clay after supper, stumbled onto a nice deposit, will be easy to process. I took a large coffee can of sandy soil from the same river a year ago and practiced separating the clay from the soil, made a fired little change dish out of it
@1:30 That wide field between two hills would have been a beaver pond in the 18th century. Beavers slowed water enough that the sediment fell out of solution and created those wide valleys. Valleys on which were later built the farms and towns of the 18th century and onward. Bring back the beavers!
I was doing my laundry 15 minutes ago and I hung up that exact shirt! Lol
That looks like you may be able to find some flour gold there. It will settle on dense clay layers as well as bedrock.so find a few friends to process what you dig up, getting to the clay . That would be cool and interesting seeing a bunch of old shaker boxes and long Tom's made from wood ,on site.
I’ve been wanting to use some clay from around me here in Tennessee for a while now, this might have finally goaded me into digging some up and throwing it in the kiln!
Love the video sir!!
Are you going to get into the types of food folks made during Samhain? That'd be great!
Thanks for another excellent quality video. I would also like to know how they made glaze for pottery, in the 18th century, in North America. I'm sure you will cover that subject at some point. Cheers!
I’m planning on digging out a root cellar on my property in a couple years or so. That might be a great time to look d’or clay as well.
Looks like a lot of fun! Thanks for hunting wild clay!
Pot holes are called that for a reason. Potters would dig clay where they could and the side of the road is very handy.
Thanks again for a wonderful video!
I wish you were in Missouri. We hit some clay East of KC that I think you would love and I’d give you as much as you could take. Great video love you guys!👍
I remember digging holes as a kid and finding _massive_ chunks of beautiful bright orange clay all the time, I thought that's what all dirt was just like. I lived near Vermillion, Ohio, which was named after the same clay deposits that are a beautiful vermillion color. Even living like 20 minutes away now, the soil isn't the same
Thank you. Love this😊
Here in my local area of Ky, its easy to find a white or red clay in creeks and lake edges. There's a 500 acre place called 'Red Banks'. Only scrub will grow because of the super high clay content. It took my uncle 4 years ro get a patch conditioned for a garden!
Around our area to find clay all you have to do is walk anywhere between the two mountains and look down at your feet. We have two types lighter tan and medium grey clays. If you happen to hit the rare area with dark rich soil from the forest just dig down a foot or so and there is the clay again. The stream that cuts through the mountains deposited the clays over the years. When I was a kid, I used to make plates, cups and mugs to play with and ashtrays for my parents to use out of clay. Now that I am an adult, I curse it because I'm trying to grow a garden in it these days.
This is really interesting! Looking forward to see the results.
I live near some vild Clay in vestre gran Hadeland norway
Definitely want more videos like this an will have to check the website.
I think these are my favorite videos you do
Another wonderful, interesting episode!
That's one handsome shirt, my learned friend...
I've done this. It is very satisfying to make everything myself according to the old ways.
I remember finding a large clay deposit on the shore of the Connecticut river around deerfield. I wonder how many people came down to get clay over the years.
What a wonderful place to live. You are very privileged, Mr Townsend.
We had clay deposits on our farm in Dover NH, and it was said that years ago there was a small brick mill near the brook. It was only a foundation hole scattered around with bricks in my lifetime. And you can see where the land was dug out in areas. We would dig the clay and play with it when we were kids. And a few miles away was the town of Gonic. Short for the Indian name Squannamagonic. I think it means land between the waters. There was a huge brick yard there that operated into the 1980’s.
Fond memories of an art camp in historic Chester Springs, PA, where we sourced, sculpted, and fired our own clay.
Best to have a iron rod that is the same as what's used to hunt bog iron, when you can slowly push the probe slowly down through the top layer you know a thick sticky patch of clay lies below.
Our area where I grew up in Marshal County, Indiana, had a LOT of clay in the soil--and digging down just a couple feet we would find solid clay.
This vid is right up my alley
The funny part is you can take almost any dirt, soak it and wash away everything but the clay. There's almost always clay in dirt, just far less in certain areas. If you find an area with some clay around odds are the "regular dirt" around it will hold a decent amount of clay too. Here in Northern California our dirt is almost as red as Australia's and has a very high amount of clay which when separated becomes the classic adobe... hence there's an adobe/terracotta factory 20 miles from me in Lincoln.
You should come to Oklahoma. You can literally just reach over to the banks and scoop out a big handful of red fine silty clay. You can pull wheel barrows of it out.
Here in the swamps of Northern Michigan, We have no problem finding Clay. The Grey type.
I admire your comittment to using period tools and clothing.