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    Alberta Clay Products was from the start a huge capital venture. Founded by a predominantly American syndicate, the company was rapidly taken over by one of the original Medicine Hat investors and remained in the hands of himself and his family throughout its most productive years.

In November 1908, Warren Overpack of Webster City, Iowa met with Medicine Hat City Council on behalf of a group of American investors. His purpose was to discuss the prospect of constructing a sewer pipe factory. Overpack felt that Medicine Hat possessed the ideal essentials of a manufacturing centre: cheap fuel and power. convenient transportation, and ample deposits of first-class clay for manufacturing. He promised a planned expenditure of $150,000 in buildings and capital, and year-round employment for 60 to 100 men. Council responded with an offer of 40 acres of land, a gas well drilled on site, and a fifteen-year tax exemption. Construction began in November, 1909 with every brick used being manufactured on the premises. The plant complex was, enormous, with fourteen round downdraft kilns surrounding a four-storey main building measuring 256 by 80 feet. The factory was equipped to produce brick, building tile, and sewer pipe. Production started in the fall of 1910 when, months before the completion of the premises, the company began shipping five carloads of brick daily out of the city. The plant went into full operation in November 1911, working twenty-one hours a day. By 1912, it was the largest clay products plant in Canada, employing 200 men for wages amounting to $75,000 annually. The company manufactured one million bricks a month, in addition to tiles and other ceramic construction materials, and shipped them from Winnipeg to Vancouver.

The success of the Alberta Clay Products Company drew considerable interest elsewhere in Canada and further a field. Sir Wilfred Laurier and Premier Sifton visited the site with a group of political and business leaders about 1910, followed by a delegation of British investors in 1912 who represented an estimated £250,000,000.