The Glass Makers
On October 6, 1886, a group of speculators drilling a well in Howard County discovered natural gas. Lighting it, the 20-foot flame could be seen for miles that night. The next eight exploratory wells in the area were successful. News of the significant gas discoveries traveled quickly, and it was estimated that the gas would last for 200 to 300 years. That proved to be incorrect, but Indiana’s legacy in glassmaking had been launched.
Firms such as the Indiana Glass Company, in Dunkirk, devoted its plant to the production of pressed and blown decorative glass. From a population of 491 in 1887, the city of Alexandria grew to more than 7,200 in 1900 because of the need for functional glass. The Harper and Cruzen Glass Factory, Lippincott Glass Chimney Co., DePauw Plate Glass Co., and the DePauw Window Glass Co. all developed factories there and needed workers.
And while Indiana’s glass fortunes expanded statewide – for example, the Root Glass Company designed and produced the original Coca-Cola bottles in Terre Haute – the glass brand that became a household name was Ball. In 1880, the five Ball brothers started the Wooden Jacket Can Company in Buffalo, New York, but the glass canning jar was the brothers’ focus when the renamed company relocated to Muncie to take advantage of the readily available natural gas. At its peak, Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company produced 30 jars a minute in its five plants, with an additional 2,500 employees in its Muncie headquarters.
Today, Indiana’s highest-profile functional glassmaker is just outside Muncie, in Dunkirk. Ardagh Group was founded in Dublin in 1932 as the Irish Glass Bottle Company. It now operates in 26 countries, employs 22,000 people and controls approximately 50 percent of the North American glass container market. Not unlike the 1930s, when the volume of Ball jars produced in Muncie captured the world’s attention, today Ardagh’s Dunkirk operation produces three million longneck beer bottles DAILY for AB InBev, parent company of Budweiser.
INDIANA’S ART GLASS community was launched with that first gas well discovered northwest of Kokomo in 1886. Charles Edward Henry, a glass chemist, immigrated to the United States from France and formed Henry Art Glass in New Rochelle, New York in 1883. Henry Art Glass made glass buttons, novelties, and opalescent glass rods. While producing glass products, Henry met many glass artists in the New York area including Louis Tiffany. Hearing about the gas boom in Central Indiana and returning to New York from a business trip to Chicago, he stopped in Kokomo. On his second day in Kokomo, local officials provided Henry with a plant site and a natural gas supply.
He built a glass production plant with a seven-pot furnace, and production started at Opalescent Glass Works on November 13, 1888, and it has been in continuous operation at that location ever since. Most important to Indiana’s art glass history was the shipment three days later – on November 16, 1888, the first shipment of sheet glass went to Louis Tiffany. It included 600 pounds of blue and white opalescent glass.
Tiffany continued to be one of Henry’s customers, and in 1893 he purchased more than 10,000 pounds of glass from Opalescent Glass Works. Kokomo Opalescent Glass continues to be a source for restoration glass, and it still has, and mixes, many of the same “recipes” that established it as a premier glass manufacturer. Its Hot Glass Studio was established in 1998 to produce a wide range of quality hand-blown and hand-cast glass using its world-famous Kokomo Opalescent Glass. There, the company’s glass blowers create one-of-a-kind and limited edition functional and sculptural glass objects and rondels.
Building on that heritage are dozens of Indiana glass artists, some in business for decades in and around the former Trenton Gas Field in east central Indiana. Some, like the fourth-generation glassmakers at Zimmerman Art Glass, expand the state’s art glass community all the way to the Ohio River, in Corydon.
The Indiana Glass Trail links all of Indiana’s glassmakers, as well as the state’s glass-focused galleries, museums, exhibits, festivals, and workshops/classes, and this 11-minute documentary produced by Taylor University students travels that Trail.