GLASS MANUFACTURING IN AMER ICA. A glass-house built near Jamestown in 1608, the year after Virginia was founded, was the first factory in the English colonies in America. In that year eight Poles and Ger mans were brought there to make ashes, soap, pitch; tar and glass. From ashes were obtained lye for making soap and potash for fluxing glass. Some glass shipped to England in 1608 or 1609 was among the first exports of the colony. Interfered with by the craze for rais ing tobacco, the manufacture of glass was sus pended about 1615. In 1621 another glass house was erected in which Italians made beads for trade with Indians. One or both glass houses were destroyed in the massacre by Indians in 1622. The next glass works in Virginia of which there is a record were at Alexandria, where 10,000 pounds were manu factured in 1787. Works established at Wells burg, Va. (now West Virginia), in 1815, were probably the works in Brooke County reported by census as making $20,000 worth of glass in 1820. At the tariff convention, held in New York city in 1831, two flint glass furnaces were reported in operation at Wellsburg and one at Wheeling; also two window glass works at Wheeling.
The first glass-house in Massachusetts was built in Salem about 1639. To encourage the enterprise the General Court in 1641 author ized the town to lend the proprietors 130. Glass was manufactured there for perhaps 20 years or longer. The General Court of Massachusetts in 1752 granted to Isaac C. Winslow and others the exclusive privilege of making glass in the colony and they probably built a glass house at Boston which was in operation until shortly before the Revolution. The legisla ture, in 1787, granted to Messrs. Whalley, Hun newell and others a charter, which conferred on them exclusively the right to manufacture glass in Massachusetts for 15 years, and fixed the penalty for infringement at $500. The capital stock was exempted from taxation and the workmen from military duty. Furthermore, the State paid a bounty on the product, to off set a bounty on glass exports paid by England. Under this charter, the manufacture of crown window glass was begun, in 1792, and about six years later the production amounted to $82,000 per annum. The glass, known through out the United States as °Boston window glass,° was said to be superior to any imported. This State-aided enterprise, incorporated in 1809 as the Boston Crown Glass Company, is said to have been the first successful glass works in this country. Works established in 1802 at
Middlesex, now a part of Lowell, made annu ally, about 1820, about 330,000 feet of window glass, which at $13 a 100-foot box amounted to $43,320. In 1812 a glass-house was built at South Boston and about the same time another at East Cambridge. The one at South Boston, the first flint glass works in Massachusetts, was built by Thomas Caines, a skilled batch mixer and glass blower, who had been employed by the Boston Crown Glass Company. After the War of 1812 the business failed. The works at East Cambridge were built by the Porcelain and Glass Manufacturing Company, which em ployed glass workers from Europe. Unsuc cessful in business, the company leased the plant to a firm of workmen, Emmet, Fisher and Flowers. They failed to agree, and, in 1817, the business was sold at auction to the New England Glass Company, which was very suc cessful. In 1823 the weekly production was 22,400 pounds of glass vessels, many of which were equal to the product of the best English flint houses, and some of which were beautifully cut. A plant established at Sandwich, Mass., in 1825, introduced, in 1827, the making of pressed glass. Until then all glass had been either blown or cast. The shaping of glass by molds made possible the production at low cost of many articles of the same pattern.
Glass was made in New York State under both the Dutch and English regimes, but plants established before 1850 were not permanent. A plant started at Brooklyn, in 1754, existed only a short time. In 1785 Leonard De Neuf ville and associates, proprietors of a plant at Dowesborough, 10 miles from Albany, applied to the legislature for aid. They gave as a rea son that $150,000 a year was sent abroad for glass. The legislature, in 1793, voted a loan of $3,000 for eight years, free of interest for three years and at 5 per cent for five years. By this time ownership of the works had passed from the De Neufville family to hfcCallen, McGregor & Company, who con ducted the business successfully, but, in 1815, the works closed for lack of fuel. The South Ferry Flint Glass Company, established in 1823 at Brooklyn, had the reputation of making the finest flint glass made in the United States, and at the London Exhibition, in 1851, was awarded a medal.