This month's museum pick...

Museum of American Glass
Glass, Glorious Glass

by Dea Adria Mallin

When I was three years old, the milk wagon would pull up in front of the apartment where we lived, and a small daily drama would begin. There was the head toss and the foot stomp of the whinnying horse as milk bottles clattered against the iron carrier, and there was the milkman, leaning precariously to one side as the heavy load of bottles pulled him off-center. Sometimes the horse was quiet, merely snapping its tail against the summer flies, but the milkman was always noisy, arranging and rearranging his deliveries and clomping up the steps to each apartment or house where he collected our rinsed, empty bottles and replaced them with brilliantly white, full bottles. The system of delivery meant fresh milk direct from the cows on the farm into my child-sized glass.

Soon enough, the horses and the wagons disappeared, replaced by milk trucks, but the milk was still delivered fresh daily in glass bottles. Somewhere in my late childhood, the milkman who arrived at work in the dark and finished his deliveries before breakfast was replaced by the supermarket, and the glass bottle was forsaken for coated cardboard and then for plastic.

Replaced and gone, but not entirely forgotten. In the sunlit galleries of the Museum of American Glass in the small town of Millville, New Jersey, the largest and most complete museum of American glass in the country, the hallowed milk bottles of my childhood have a place, along with another 12,000 pieces of glass, many of them used in the preparation and presentation of food. In an oblique sense, the American Glass Museum is very much about the delivery of food to the American table.

Think ordinary water glasses and fancy lead crystal goblets. Think Mason jars and Bell jars for storing and canning. Think pitchers and tumblers, compote glasses, serving bowls, Pepsi bottles and spring water bottles and liquor bottles. Think decanters, plates, celery dishes, “spooners” for the set of tea spoons left on the table, elegant sugar bowls, and blown salt cellars festooned with swags and garlands. Think pickle jars and baby bottles and even Aunt Tillie’s green glass bottle of Dr. Townsend’s extract of “sarsaparilla,” (worth a pretty price today) with sassafras bark, molasses, and cheap rye whiskey – Aunt Tillie’s personal medication, 6.5% alcohol.  

The History of Glass

Before the making of glass was in man’s hands, nature made glass through the fusion of heat and sand. Lightning striking sand can fuse sand into long, slender glass tubes, while volcanic eruptions can fuse rocks and sand into a glass called obsidian, shaped by early man into knives, arrowheads, jewelry, and money.

The first glass vessels were produced around 1500 B.C. in Egypt and Mesopotamia for the priests and the ruling class. Around 30 B.C., the first blowpipe -- a long, thin metal tube used in the blowing process -- was invented, revolutionizing glass production and taking glass off the luxury list. The Romans then began blowing glass inside molds, increasing the variety of shapes for hollow glass vessels. It was the Roman Empire that created glassmaking as an art across western Europe and the Mediterranean, and with the discovery of clear glass, attainable through manganese oxide, cast glass windows began to appear. After the fall of the Roman Empire, however, the art and craft of glassmaking did not emerge importantly until the Middle Ages, when Venice became the glassmaking center of the world. There were 8,000 Venetian makers of glass whose brilliance and delicate imaginative forms emerged from the furnace to enchant the world. So critical were the glassmakers to Venetian trade that there were prohibitions (with a death penalty) against leaving, and the skills and secrets remained internal.  

In 1674, the Englishman George Ravenscroft patented his new glass -- lead crystal -- as part of a commission to find a substitute for Venetian glass (based on pure quartz sand and potash). By using higher proportions of lead oxide instead of potash, Ravenscroft produced a glass that was suited for deep cutting and engraving. In 1688, a new process for plate glass, used for mirrors, was developed in France, and by the 20^th century, powerful developments in glassmaking occurred, from new methods of cutting, welding, sealing, and tempering to fiberglass-plastic bodies for cars, special glass for use in nuclear energy plants, glass that can store radioactive wastes, and much more. The fuel used in the industry shifted from wood to natural gas, and with underground pipelines, glass plants no longer needed to be located near their fuel sources.  

A Utilitarian Tale: Glass in America

The Museum of American Glass tells the story with a life-sized replica of the glassblowing environment, replete with blower, gaffer, gatherer and carryin’-in boys at the furnace itself, plus superb wall text to accompany the wealth of glass pieces. Displayed in huge rooms with 18-foot ceilings and abundant light from floor to ceiling windows, the glass sparkles, reflects, refracts, dazzles.

Early American glass begins in 1608 in Jamestown, Virginia, but a famine closed that first factory within a year. The industry actually started in 1739 when Caspar Wistar, a successful Philadelphia businessman, built a glassmaking plant across the Delaware River in Alloway, New Jersey, where there was sufficient wood for fuel (the furnaces soared to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit), as well as sand. Just as Venetian law kept glassblowers from leaving Murano, English policy would not let glassblowers emigrate to the New World, so Wistar recruited his glassblowers from Germany. The company lasted until 1782, producing mostly a lovely green and turquoise glass whose color derived from the iron impurity in the New Jersey sand.

Wistar produced bottle after bottle after bottle for liquids and foods. Doctors, druggists, tavern keepers, brewers, and housewives became dependent on his storage bottles, often decorated with threading and tooled ornamentation. Bottles were vastly preferred over metal and pottery for stored foods and beverages, for medicines, and for perfumes because of their transparency -- and because the glass did not react with the stored items. (Consider that the ubiquitous plastic containers we use today, deemed progress, may leach into our stored food and drink.) Prior to glass storage, frontier Americans were limited to dried, pickled, smoked, and salted foods during the long winters.

But back to the museum. The list of glass factories in South Jersey grew and became vast – in Millville, Vineland, Malaga, Bridgeton, Clayton, Franklinville, and others, attested to by a map in the museum identifying each. All told, there were over 200 glass factories, though today, only twelve remain. The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that Millville at night was all “great rafts of wood and big, brick hulks, dotted with a myriad of lights, glowing and twinkling every shade of red. Big, black fumes shooting out smoke and sparks; bottles, bottles, bottles of every tint and hue from a brilliant crimson to a dull green that marks the death of sand and the birth of glass.”

The museum has a marvelous collection of their glass production and that of the other early glass producers in the United States. There are whiskey bottles blown in the shapes of corn ears and fish, early pickle jars blown into the shape of Gothic cathedral windows, figural bottles in the shape of vegetables or cigars, and bottles for pepper sauces whose spice and heat was needed to mask the bad taste of meat.

The museum displays its glass baby bottles, available as early as 1850, with names like “Little Papoose” and “Baby Bunting.” By the 1920’s, ounce markings and bunnies and cartoon characters were part of the bottle design. Milk bottles, to replace milk pans, began in Switzerland in 1866, and were quickly taken up in America where there was, by 1880, a glass lid. By 1925, there was the American cream top bottle with a special spoon to fit neatly into the top and gather up the cream that rose.

And there is the Mason jar. John Landis Mason, a tinsmith from Vineland, NJ, invented an easy-to-use glass jar with a threaded lip and screwtight metal cap, and a year later, someone else invented a glass liner for the lid. “Mason’s Patent November 30 1858” was embossed on the jars that became the standard fruit jar, safe and at minimal expense, to households across the nation. Three years later, Louis Pasteur explained to the world how boiling the jars and the food worked to kill microscopic organisms.

The first enormous change in glassmaking after the blowpipe occurred nearly 2,000 years later, in 1903, with Michael Owens’ invention of the automatic bottle-making machine in Toledo. Until then, all glass was hand blown into a mold, whether wood or metal. After that, automation took over the glass factory, and for the rest of the 20^th century the science and engineering of glass moved by leaps and bounds.   

Sadly, one of the effects of automation was that “end-of-the-day” activities came to a halt with a thud. The practice in all the South Jersey glass factories allowed glassblowers who had finished their daily quota to indulge in creative use of the facilities, and the museum has evidence of talent aplenty. There are glass canes with a joyous outbreak of color, there are glass horns and trumpets, glass balls, witch balls, ships, lilies, animals, and there are paperweights, hundreds and hundreds of them, all fabulous. 

The late 20^th century and the shift to decorative glass in America

So automated was the glass factory after 1903 that without extra glass for end-of-the-day work, talented glassblowers’ creativity and sharing of ideas and techniques was squelched. Half a century later, that creativity blossomed again with an expansion of glassmaking to the decorative. In the museum is a huge wing dedicated to the sculptural art, both playful and somber, of contemporary glass. On view is a Louis Tiffany collection, Steuben pieces, Frederick Carden’s personally wrought glass, and the South Jersey Durand factory’s sensuous Art Nouveau. The museum thoughtfully pairs glass experimentation with contemporaneous new technologies: the Brownie camera, Alcoa aluminum foil, RCA Victor sound machines, Orlon, and the Cadillac.                 

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The Museum of American Glass, opened in 1973, is part of Wheaton Arts, on 65 wooded acres, with a mission to engage artists and audiences in exploring creativity. To this end they maintain their Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship Program for mid-career glassmakers who donate one of the pieces they produce during their residency to the permanent contemporary collection.

Wheaton Arts has also sponsored, since 1985, a 3-day Glass Weekend, with display galleries, hands-on glassmaking, demonstrations, and lectures by museum curators and other noted authorities. This biennial weekend has become one of the most respected glass events in the country, attracting Dale Chihuly and Lino Tagliapetra, among other major national and international glassmakers.

In a dynamic and vast studio complex, skilled docents comment for the public on daily demonstrations of glassblowing. The complex also maintains the Down Jersey Folklife Center, four museum stores, a substantial event center, artist residences, student outreach programs, seminars, a blow-your-own-glass program for the public, festivals such as the Italian Festa del’Arte or Marble Weekend for glass marble artists, collectors, and dealers, and special exhibits such as the current one, juxtaposing exquisite glass pieces from Venice with American modern pieces using Venetian techniques. All glass, glorious glass. All “food” for thought!