Pitkin Glass Works Presentation for MoCG

Dana Charlton-Zarro and Annie, January 2020 Museum of Connecticut Glass meeting.

 This past weekend the Museum of Connecticut Glass held its annual meeting at Patriots Park in Coventry, Ct. Museum president Noel Tomas passed away last year, so there were a number of difficult decisions on the agenda. After a protracted business meeting, the museum board and members adjourned for a potluck lunch and a fascinating discussion of the Pitkin Glass Works by Tom Duff of Manchester and the Pitkin Queen herself, Dana Charlton-Zarro.

Tom Duff with a Pitkin flask.

 The process of making a Pitkin-type flask was complex, involving double-dipping the initial bubble of glass (the "German half-post method" of bottle making), embossing ribs with a pattern mold, and twisting the bottle to shape the ribs into a helical swirl. One interesting point that came up in the discussion is that the swirl may have been introduced by rotating the bottle as it was being withdrawn from the pattern mold (as opposed to giving the bottle a sharp spin on the end of blowpipe after it was free of the mold, as I had heard in the past).

"Cross-swirled" Pitkin-type flask. 

 A "cross-swirled" flask was brought for display at the meeting. These flasks, with two sets of helical ribs swirled in opposite directions, are exceedingly rare, with probably fewer than half a dozen extant. It's not entirely clear how these were manufactured, but it probably involved even more skill than making the much more common single swirl or broken swirl (helix overlain by a set of plain vertical ribs) Pitkin flasks.

Pitkin-type flask from Poland. 

 Another oddity brought out for the presentation was a Pitkin-type flask from Poland. This continental flask was made by the German half-post method and has the broken-swirl pattern and basic flattened oval form often seen in New World Pitkin flasks, but is cruder and much thicker than is typical for Connecticut examples. Possibly it represents an ancestral form of this style of bottle, which was later refined and perfected by immigrant glassblowers working in America.

Sunburst flasks attributed to the Pitkin Glass Works: GVIII-5, GVIII-5a and GVIII-7, along with Pitkin-type flask and junk bottle/black glass wine bottle of the sort also made in early Connecticut glass works. 

Free blown, dip molded and pattern molded glass with very similar shapes and forms was made at many early American (and in some cases European) glass factories, so it is not really possible to associate a particular Pitkin-type flask with the actual Pitkin Glass Works. Mold-blown flasks, in contrast, leave behind distinctive shards in the archaeological record and can often be more or less definitively associated with a particular manufacturer (with the caveat that occasional stray shards from one factory could conceivably wind up at an unrelated factory site, perhaps brought in as cullet for recycling). Three different pint sunburst flasks are thought to be Pitkin products, with the GVIII-5 Pitkin sunburst in particular being firmly established by archaeological finds at the factory site in Manchester.