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| The Pitkin Glass Works ruins. |
The 1783~1830 Pitkin Glass Works ruins were open to the public this weekend, in conjunction with Manchester Pride Week and the Connecticut tourism open house day. It was a rare chance to see the ruins up close, although they are located in a residential neighborhood and can be viewed from the street over a fence at any time. The Pitkin factory is the oldest of Connecticut's glass works, and also, by some fluke of history, the only early Connecticut glass factory where significant portions of the factory building itself are still standing (there are still some visible foundations at the site of the Westford Glass Company, but all of the other factories have been completely leveled).
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| Waste glass drips and broken bottles in a bald spot in the lawn on the Pitkin grounds. The glass is mostly olive-green-amber, but notice the two light blue-green shards at center, examples of an uncommon but legitimate Pitkin color. |
Even on the surface of the soil around the ruins there are occasional pieces of glass and other factory waste. Early glass works were pretty messy affairs, apparently, and Pitkin debris can be found all around the area. Several neighbors stopped in during the open house to talk to the staff of the Manchester Historical Society and donate pieces of glass that they had unearthed when gardening or having old oil tanks removed.
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| Excavations inside the walls of the factory ruins, with some possible foundation stones exposed. |
A number of archaeological digs have been conducted at the Pitkin Glass Works, including extensive investigations by Fredrick Warner and his students from Central Connecticut State University in 1984 (summarized in
A History of the Pitkin Glass Works by William E. Buckley), as well as more recent and
ongoing excavations carried out by Manchester middle school students.
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| Stones and old bricks exposed by school group excavations. |
The walls of the Pitkin factory building are primarily made of grey gneiss. The local bedrock in most of Manchester is Triassic sedimentary "red beds" and basalt, so construction materials were probably carted in, perhaps from the quarries at Bolton Notch, east of Manchester.
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| Artifacts excavated at the Pitkin site by Tom Duff. Two pontiled bases of Pitkin-type pattern molded flasks in olive green; the side of an umbrella inkwell in dark olive amber; and a large fragment of a ceramic pot for melting glass. |
Archaeological excavations at glass factory sites provide some of the strongest evidence for attributing particular products to a given glass works. Pitkin-type flasks, with swirled or broken swirl pattern-molded embossings and blown in the German half-post method, are indeed fairly abundantly represented among shards from the Pitkin Glass Works. Extremely similar flasks were also blown at other contemporaneous New England glass works, however. Tom Duff has an interesting shard in his collection of Pitkin materials, picked up near the ruins many years ago, that is clearly from a Coventry Lafayette figured flask. Glass factories incorporate old broken glass, or cullet, into new batches to hasten melting, so the Lafayette shard was probably left behind from a pile of broken bottles collected from the community for recycling. Care must be taken when interpreting finds from factory sites; clear patterns certainly emerge and provide solid links between certain types of bottles and certain factories where multiple fragments of those bottles have been recovered, but odd one-off shards could be misleading.
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| Tom Duff's display of glass factory tools and New England bottles representative of the likely products of the Pitkin Glass Works. |
Representatives of the Manchester Historical Society and the Pitkin Glass Works organization were on hand to answer questions, with displays of bottles and other artifacts. Tom Duff brought in Pitkin-type flasks and inkwells, as well as figured flasks, case gin bottles and other glassware typical of the goods that were likely produced by Pitkin. He also had blow pipes and other glass house tools, including a ribbed iron mold used to make pattern molded glass, along with a modern teal-colored Pitkin-type flask blown in his mold by
Pairpoint Glass on Cape Cod. The 32 rib mold was recovered from a warehouse in New Jersey, but could conceivably be an eighteenth or early nineteenth century antique from New England.
