MADE IN HAMILTON
20TH CENTURY
INDUSTRIAL TRAIL

SITE 28
HOEPFNER REFINING COMPANY, 1899
ROYAL RECYCLING

This company was formed by many of the same men who had such success with the Hamilton Blast Furnace Company (later Stelco) in 1895. They wanted to turn Hamilton into the Canadian centre for primary metals.

In 1899, industrial promoter John Patterson led the formation of the Hoepfner Refining Company. The company built these brick refinery buildings in 1899. Patterson and his colleagues wanted to break the nickel refining monopoly of the Canadian Copper Company. In the end, company officials failed to develop a cost-efficient refining process that would make production worthwhile. The buildings were never used for their intended purpose.

The company put the unused refinery buildings up for lease in 1905. That year, the Pittsburgh Perfect Wire Fence Company set up in the complex of buildings north of the Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo railway spur which ran through the property. Two years later, the E.C. Atkins and Company of Indianapolis, Indiana started a saw blade and machine knife factory in the rest of the buildings set back along Biggar Avenue. In 1933, Sovereign Potters began making semi-porcelain tableware and vitrified hotelware here. Royal Recycling presently operates on this site.

Walter Smith started work at Sovereign Potters in 1939 stacking dishes in the drying room. He resumed work here as a "jigger" after returning from air force duty in the Second World War. This was highly skilled work. Smith used a jig to cut dinner plates and other tableware on his spinning potter's wheel.