Ughill
The fire brick company Thomas Wragg & Sons owned a Pot Clay mine immediately to the south east of the hamlet. Pot Clay is the impure version of Ganister and was in demand in the Sheffield steel industry to make bricks for the lining of furnaces. In the early 1970s the mine was producing 15,000 tons of clay per year, with the company quoting, “The mine can be worked at the present rate for 100 years”. A refractory brick works stood at the entrance to the mine. However the Ughill mine had drainage problems and although powerful pumps had been installed in the 1950s to pump between 600 and 800 gallons per minute from the mine, the mine closed on 17 November 1977. It had become uneconomic to mine the clay due to water problems and the owners found it more profitable to bring in clay from the Midlands. The site of the mine has been landscaped and returned to agricultural use. J&J Dyson mined fireclay at their open cast quarry at Wheatshire between Ughill and Sugworth. The quarry is closed but can still be seen from the nearby road. Thos. Wragg had small firebrick works at Load Brook (closed 1957) and Brookside (Stopes Road, Stannington, closed 1960) the former previously owned by the Trickett family, the latter by the Drabble family and a major works (Old Wheel Brick Works) in the nearby Loxley Valley. Wraggs along with its local competitors, J&J Dyson of Griffs Works, Stannington and Thos. Marshall of Storrs Bridge Works, Loxley, mined the Stannington Pot Clay seam and manufactured fireclay-based casting pit holloware refractories for use in steel making worldwide. All three plants closed following a collapse in demand for casting pit refractories of the type made locally mainly because of the introduction of continuous casting of steel worldwide and the general demise of the British steel industry.
Cleveland-Cliffs Inc.
Demand for American iron ore hit peaks during World War I, World War II, and the post-WWII consumer boom. In 1933, Edward Greene (the son-in-law of Jeptha Homer Wade II) replaced William G. Mather as the head of the company. The Mather A Mine opened in the early 1940s and the Mather B shaft in the 1950s. As the Cold War continued, reserves of mineable hematite dwindled in northern Minnesota and Cleveland-Cliffs returned some of its focus to its traditional areas of interest around Marquette, Michigan, where new deposits of magnetite were opened. The first pellet plant was built at Eagle Mills in 1954, followed by the first grate/kiln plant at the Humboldt Mine in 1960. The Republic Mine was converted from a shaft mine to an open pit and concentrator in 1956 and a two-kiln pellet plant was added in 1962. The Empire Mine opened in 1963 and was expanded in the mid- and late-1970s; the Pioneer Pellet Plant was opened in 1965 to pelletize the underground ore from the Mather B Mine in Negaunee. In 1974 the Tilden Mine opened in Ishpeming. This mine was and is the only mine in the world with the ability to produce both hematite and magnetite pellets.