Indiana Glass Company was an American company that manufactured pressed, blown and hand-molded glassware and tableware for almost 100 years. Predecessors to the company began operations in Dunkirk, Indiana, in 1896 and 1904, when East Central Indiana experienced the Indiana gas boom. The company started in 1907, when a group of investors led by Frank W. Merry formed a company to buy the Dunkirk glass plant that belonged to the bankrupt National Glass Company. National Glass was a trust for glass tableware that originally owned 19 glass factories including the plant in Dunkirk. National Glass went bankrupt in 1907, and its assets were sold in late 1908.
Indiana Glass Company mostly made tableware, lamps, and vases although it had additional products. Collectors consider the company a manufacturer of Depression glass, Goofus glass, and Carnival glass. One well known customer was the A&W drive-in chain that featured mugs of A&W Root Beer, and Indiana Glass was the original manufacturer of root beer mugs for that company. Another major customer was Kmart.
During 1957, Lancaster Lens Company acquired a controlling interest in Indiana Glass. Lancaster Lens Company was renamed Lancaster Glass Company, but Indiana Glass continued to be a separate entity. By the 1960s, a reorganization had Indiana Glass Company as a subsidiary of Lancaster Colony Corporation. Indiana Glass had a resurgence in sales during the 1970s, and began marketing some of its tableware for the home through Lancaster Colony's Tiara Exclusives. Indiana Glass continued operating in Dunkirk until November 2002, when the plant was closed. Although a glass plant owned by Lancaster Colony continued operating in Oklahoma under the name Indiana Glass Company, that plant was part of a sale to another glass company in late 2007.
Background
During the late 1880s, the discovery of natural gas started an economic boom period in East Central Indiana. Gas was first found in Delaware County's town of Eaton and adjacent Jay County's city of Portland Manufacturers were lured to the region to take advantage of the low cost fuel. Jay County, a rural county in East Central Indiana, had only 210 people working in manufacturing in 1880. By 1900, the county had over 1,423 people employed at manufacturing plants that were mostly glass factories. East Central Indiana became the state's major manufacturing center.
Beatty-Brady Glass Company
In 1895, the Pennsylvania Railroad built a large structure along its railing in Dunkirk, Indiana, close to the southeast corner of Blackford County but inside Jay County. The building was intended to be used for railroad freight car repair, but never used. In 1896, the building was sold to George Beatty and James Brady, who started the Beatty-Brady Glass Company. By 1900, this glass plant employed 225 people, and their products were tableware.
During 1888 through 1890, most glass factories in the United States had financial difficulty. The United States had six economic contractions between 1880 and 1900. Deflation was a problem, and the term depression has been used to describe that economic time instead of simply recession. A banking crisis occurred in 1893. In addition to the difficult economic times, the Beatty-Brady Glass Company had more problems. During March 1899, George Beatty was arrested in Portland, Indiana, on six different complaints. All complaints were related to anti-union activity, and the action was said to begin "a big fight between organized and nonunion labor, and will be watched with interest all over the country..." Shortly afterwards, the matter was forwarded directly to Indiana's Supreme Court.
National Glass Company
In November 1899, the Beatty-Brady Glass Company was sold to the National Glass Company, a glass tableware trust that started as 11 glass companies and quickly became 19 with more added later. The National Glass Company factories were unionized, and their Dunkirk plant (Beatty-Brady Glass Company) became unionized January 1, 1900. The National Glass Company had its own difficulties, and was in financial trouble by 1903. Although it began with numerous factories, three had been dismantled, three were destroyed by fire (and not rebuilt), and some factories withdrew from the trust. By the end of 1904, all remaining plants were idle.
On January 22, 1904, National Glass announced that it would shrink its workforce and try a new way of operating—leasing plants to others. Among the plants leased was the Dunkirk plant (the Beatty-Brady plant), and it was leased by Frank W. Merry. The changes were made because the conglomerate had financial difficulties, and it sold or closed several of its glass plants to raise capital. The Dunkirk lease was announced in Indianapolis as "a new organization...will now operate the Beatty-Brady glass factory heretofore controlled by the National Glass Company." The new company was named Indiana Glass Company, and was said to have capital stock of $125,000. ($125,000 in 1904 is .) Merry was president. On February 10, the 250 men employed at the Dunkirk plant went on strike over issues with National Glass Company. The issues between the National Glass Company and union employees were settled in two weeks, and work resumed.
Beginning Sources do not always agree on the start date for Dunkirk's Indiana Glass Company. An unrelated Indiana Glass Company existed from 1892 to 1896 in Indiana, Pennsylvania. An Indiana Glass Works was inspected in Dunkirk in 1901, but its product was listed as bottles—and the Beatty-Brady Glass Company, a maker of tableware, was also inspected. At the beginning of 1903, Frank W. Merry was sent by National Glass Company to Dunkirk to run the Beatty-Brady plant. Merry "helped promote the organization of the Indiana Glass Company" in Dunkirk in 1904, and he was elected president of the company. The new company was announced in January 1904 when Merry leased the Dunkirk glass works owned by the National Glass Company. The Indiana Department of Inspection listed Indiana Glass Company as having 256 employees in 1904, and its products were "pressed and blown glass". There was no Beatty-Brady Glass Company or Indiana Glass Works listed. However, 1904 is not considered the start date for Indiana Glass, as most sources list 1907 as the start date for the company.
In 1907, National Glass Company defaulted on the interest payments for its bonds, and a bank brought suit for the foreclosure of mortgages that were used as security. National Glass went into receivership during December 1907. During the year, Frank Merry and associates formed a company to buy the Dunkirk glass plant. The assets of National Glass were sold at auction during November 1908. The purchase of the Dunkirk plant was final in 1909, and Frank Merry continued as president. The major stockholders were Frank Merry, Henry J. Batsch, Harold H. Phillips, Charles W. Smalley, Rathburn Fuller, and James E. Merry. Management from this time until 1915 included James Merry as vice president, Phillips as secretary and treasurer, and Batsch as factory manager. In 1915, Smalley replaced James Merry as vice president. In 1916, Charles L. Gaunt replaced Phillips as secretary and treasurer. The board of directors as of 1921 consisted of Frank Merry, Smalley, Gaunt, Batsch, and Fuller.
Early operations
Natural gas was the original fuel used by glass factories in the Dunkirk area to heat their furnaces. However, this fuel, which is desirable for glassmaking because it can heat evenly, became depleted in the region by 1905. Indiana Glass used coal from West Virginia and Kentucky to make coal gas to use as their fuel for glassmaking. Dunkirk has a railroad line that crosses the town providing a transportation resource for coal and raw materials. Sand from Illinois, soda ash from Detroit mills, and lime from northern Ohio were major raw materials brought to Dunkirk for glass making.
A trade magazine noted in 1916 that Indiana Glass had started "tank No.3, which places this plant to operating at capacity." In March, a Daubenspeck automatic tumbler machine was placed on tank number 3. This machine would take precise amounts of molten glass and feed it into the molds for products such as tumblers. It could produce products at a faster rate, and the product would have consistent dimensions.US patent 1,331,792, "Glass Molding Machine", issued 1920-02-24. Later in the year, it also noted that the company was again operating at full capacity and had many large orders for tumblers and table ware.
By the early 1920s, the plant employed about 550 people when operating at capacity, and could produce three carloads per day of glass products. The company was described in 1921 as a producer of "pressed table glassware and lamps", and "cold color and fixed decorated glassware". It had sample rooms for its products in major cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, St. Paul, and San Francisco. A customer of the company's barware products that became well known was the chain of A&W Root Beer stands. Indiana Glass was a long time producer of glass mugs used to serve A&W Root Beer. The company's tableware was pressed in molds in machines, while vases and lamps were produced by glassblowers. In 1931, Frank Merry died and Charles L. Gaunt became company president.
At the start of World War II, glass plants began making less glassware for the home and more for warfare such as lenses for aircraft, trucks, and naval vessels. Tableware production resumed in the 1950s, but demand was down. In 1953, Indiana Glass president Charles L. Gaunt announced that his company acquired a controlling interest in the Sneath Glass Company, which had been closed by a strike. The acquisition enabled the company to use Sneath's recipe for heat resistant glass—bolstering their large assortment of glassware products. At the time, Indiana Glass was a leader in barware, stemware, decorative crystal tableware, and novelties.
Making molded glassware
Glass begins as a batch of ingredients (sand, soda, lime, and other ingredients) heated in a furnace. The furnace heats the batch to a temperature over , which causes the batch to melt together and make molten glass. For glass blown into a mold, a glass blower (human or machine) extracts a small gob of molten glass that is blown into, and shaped by, a mold. For machine–made pressed glass, the molten glass moves to a machine that drops a precisely measured gob of glass into a mold. The mold moves away from the site of injection, and the glass cools.
Dunkirk's Benjamin F. Gift received a patent in 1916 for an improved glassware making machine that received a gob of molten glass, then moved the mold away while allowing the glass to cool, then discharged the glassware from the mold.US patent 1,190,145, "Automatic Centrifugal Glassware-Making Machinery", issued 1916-07-04. From the mold, the hot glass is placed on a lehr (a long conveyor inside an oven) where the glass is gradually cooled—a process called annealing. This gradual cooling is necessary to prevent the glass from becoming cracked or brittle. At the far end of the lehr, packers remove the glass and get it ready for shipping. In 1931, Indiana Glass employee Jeddiah B. Clark received a patent for an improved process for transferring molten glass (or gobs) to glass blowing or pressing machines.US patent 1,807,336, "Glass Gob Disposing Means", issued 1931-05-26. He also received a patent in 1936 for the design of a revolving tray for holding containers inside a refrigerator.US patent 1,978,695, "Revolving Tray", issued 1934-10-30.
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