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point that came up in the discussion is that the swirl may have been introduced by rotating the bottle as it was being withdrawn from the pattern mold (as opposed to giving the bottle a sharp spin on the end of blowpipe after it was free of the mold, as I had heard in the past).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.

Coventry Glass Works Pitchers

Free blown olive-amber pitcher, six inches tall. Attributed to Coventry Glass Works, via John Carpenter of Coventry.

 The Coventry Glass Works (1815-1848) are known, based on archaeological evidence and local lore, to have manufactured a range of free blown tableware, though tableware was probably a minor portion of their output compared to flasks and utility bottles. A fair number of "Coventry" pitchers exist in private and museum collections, though as always, the attribution of 200 year old free blown glass is subject to a certain degree of uncertainty, and similar items were made at various other nineteenth century glass factories in Connecticut and elsewhere in the Northeast.

Opposite side of the John Carpenter Coventry Glass Works pitcher

 The first Coventry pitcher that I have recently had a chance to examine supposedly came out of a house in Coventry, and is associated with an oldish note that reads: "This pitcher is guaranteed to be Coventry glass. It was bought around 1920 from John Carpenter of North Coventry and was blown by one of his ancestors. So he said." It is cracked to hell, but the provenance is better than average. This pitcher is in private hands, and will be auctioned by Norman C. Heckler & Co. in 2018.

Applied handle of John Carpenter pitcher.

Both likely-Coventry pitchers described here have a similar form, with threading wrapped around the mouth area. The handle was applied first near the top of the pitcher, then bent around and stuck to the side of pitcher, pulled out into a ribbon that was somewhat crudely flattened onto the pitcher body with a tool. The smooshed handle terminal is possibly an indication of Coventry origin.

Freeblown olive-green pitcher, 7.5 inches tall, attributed to Coventry Glass Works. Connecticut Historical Society collection.

The second Coventry Glass Works pitcher examined here is in the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. It's a larger example, in a lighter, greener color of glass, with more taper towards the base. It's a lovely piece of early Connecticut glass, but is not currently on display.

Applied handle of Coventry pitcher, Connecticut Historical Society.

Base of Coventry pitcher, Connecticut Historical Society.

Pitkin Flask Display

Pitkin-type flask display at the Museum of Connecticut Glass. June 17, 2017.

The June open house at the Museum of Connecticut Glass hosted a unique display of about 30 Pitkin-type flasks, plus some related bottles and inkwells. Dana Charlton-Zarro, a well-regarded specialist in this style of early American glass, was kind enough to bring up a portion of her fabulous collection for the open house, and to stay around to share her extensive knowledge of the bottles.

Dana's collection focuses on New England Pitkin-type flasks, many of which were indeed made at the Pitkin Glass Works, though more or less identical bottles were produced by the Coventry, Mather, Glastenbury and probably Willington glass factories in Connecticut, as well as in New Hampshire factories. Glassware in the same general style was produced in Mid Atlantic and Midwestern glass works, though the forms, colors and rib counts of New England Pitkins seem to be fairly distinctive.

The process of blowing Pitkin-type flasks was complex and required multiple steps executed by a skilled craftsman. Various modern glass studios, including Pairpoint on Cape Cod, have attempted to recreate New England Pitkins, though the delicate patterns and eggshell-thin glass of better antique flasks seems to be very difficult to replicate. At some point, probably around 1820, Pitkin-type flasks went out of production, replaced by sunburst flasks and other styles of embossed bottles blown in two part metal molds, in a much less technically demanding procedure.

Dana Charlton-Zarro (with flask) explains the finer points of Pitkin-type flasks to some Museum visitors.

The gaffer had some difficulties with this bottle: some sections of the sides got folded over and stuck to themselves during the blowing process.

Some smaller Pitkin flasks, between four and five inches tall. Pitkins below five inches tall (or more than seven inches) are relatively rare.

Pitkin type inkwells. The squared-off example (center left) was probably expanded in a dip mold for snuffs, and was recovered from a Connecticut stream bank relatively recently. The "cross-swirled" example (center right), with ribs curved to the left and to the right, is also very rare.

Some more special Pitkins: pint and half-pint examples in a blue-green color, with barely any hint of olive (the color is more blue in person), and a greenish, wide, flattened bottle with very tight ribbing.

Museum of Connecticut Glass 2017

Center of the National Historic Glass Factory District in Coventry, Ct: the old University of Connecticut agricultural experiment barn, the Capt. John Turner house (both MoCG property) and the Nathaniel Root house.

 The Museum of Connecticut Glass started their 2017 schedule of public events with the annual antique glass and bottle show. Tours were also offered of the John Turner house, which was built ca. 1812-1813 by one of the incorporators of the Coventry Glass Works.

The sales field at the Coventry glass show, May 20, 2017.

  In spite of some cool, cloudy weather with a few drops of rain for the first half of the show, there was a great selection of glass up for sale, and a decent turnout of buyers, though it possibly wasn't as busy as some other Coventry shows in recent years. There was a conflict with another area glass sale, which probably didn't help, at least from the seller's point of view.

Stoneware, case bottles and more on offer.

Some of the good stuff: Willington, Westford and New London flasks.

A Coventry DEWITT CLINTON / LAFAYETTE half pint historical flask, GI-81.

There weren't many New England Pitkin flasks available at the show this year, but in June there will be a chance to check out one of the best collections of Pitkin flasks anywhere...

Connecticut or New England Pitkin-type flasks. 

Next month's Museum activity will be a display of Pitkin-type flasks and related early American glass, with expert Dana Charlton-Zarro on hand to share her knowledge of the subject. This will, I believe, be the first time that Dana has traveled to the Pitkin homeland in Connecticut to give a public talk about her favorite antique bottles, and it should be a special opportunity to see and learn about a beautiful and widely admired class of early glassware. The Pitkin display will be held Saturday, June 17, 1:00-4:00 at the Museum of Connecticut Glass.

Future MoCG open houses will be held the third Saturday of each month, 1:00-4:00, through the autumn. Special exhibits will include:
• July 15 - Victorian glass tableware manufacture in Connecticut, with Nick Wrobleski (tentative).
• August 19 - Coventry Glass Works flasks and other antique Connecticut blown-in-mold glass.
• September 16 - early Connecticut freeblown and pattern-molded tableware, whimsies and other rarities, with Tom Marshall.
• October 21 - TBA.

Museum of Connecticut Glass Season Opener

The John Turner House.

 The Museum of Connecticut Glass started its 2016 season of open houses this weekend, with tours of the ca. 1813 house of John Turner, one of the incorporators of the Coventry Glass Works. The temperatures were a bit cool, especially inside of the Turner house, with its massive double-layered brick walls and dearth of windows on the south side, but the weather was clear and bright and turnout was good.

The MCG barn, with guests arriving.

 The guests included some locals who saw the "open" signs and were curious, and also people who had traveled specifically to see the Museum. One fellow was an antique building specialist who was more interested in the Turner house itself than Connecticut glass; he was absolutely ecstatic to see that the structure had been stabilized, but was otherwise in mostly unrenovated condition, with 200 years of modifications and a lot of well-used grunginess. Visitors like seeing the house, but that sort of deep enthusiasm was something I hadn't encountered before.

Display of early bottles, of the kind made at the Pitkin Glass Works. L-R: black glass wine bottle, chestnut bottle, Pitkin-type flask, GVIII-7 pint sunburst flask, dip molded snuff bottle.

The display this month was glass connected with the Pitkin, Coventry and Willington glass factories, along with the more permanent collections of memorabilia and excavated shards from Coventry, and a small exhibit on the Meriden Flint Glass Company. The next open house will be May 21, 2016, in association with the Museum's annual tailgate-style bottle and glass sale. 

Pitkin Display at the Old Manchester Museum

Pitkin-type flask, decanter and utility bottles possibly made at the Pitkin Glass Works.

 The Old Manchester Museum, located on Cedar Street in Manchester Connecticut, is home to quite a nice educational display dealing with the Pitkin Glass Works. It includes bottles that are attributed with varying degrees of certainty to Pitkin, as well as associated artifacts, photographs, modern commemorative items and paintings, all labelled with useful explanations and donor information.

The Museum building.

 The Old Manchester Museum is operated by the Manchester Historical Society, and is currently open only one afternoon per month, on the second Sunday, although school group tours occur at other times and it is possible to arrange for special access. Exhibits include areas focusing on town schools, local sports figures, Bon Ami soap (based for a time in Manchester), the once extensive silk industry, quarries and dinosaur fossils, and the Spencer Repeating Rifle, the world's first practical multi-shot rifle, which was invented in Manchester and proved instrumental in winning the Civil War for the Union. All of this was informative, but I was mainly there for the Pitkin display.

The Museum has the massive iron lock to the glass factory door.

A free blown demijohn, 2-3 gallon capacity, donated in 1991 by Hazel Cooper. According to Cooper, this bottle was blown at the Pitkin Glass Works and passed down by descendants of the Pitkin family.

A "J.P.F." mold-blown inkwell, known from archaeological evidence to be a Pitkin product.

A miniature free blown chestnut flask, 1.8 inches high, side and bottom views. This flask was excavated by middle school students working with Connecticut State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni at the Pitkin ruins, on May 14, 2003. This is truly a unique item, both in terms of its tiny size and impeccable Pitkin attribution. It also seems to be extremely unusual to find intact glassware actually on the site of an old glass factory. A 2012 article in the Manchester Journal Inquirer recounts collectors at the time of the dig offering $5,000, and then $20,000, for this odd little bottle, which has fortunately remained on public display.

Some shards from the Pitkin Glass Works site, with the pontiled base of a big free blown bottle in light blue-green, almost aquamarine, glass at left, and the base of an olive-green figured flask at right. The figured flask fragment included just a few non-distinctive portions of ribbed sides, and could be from any of a number of molds, such as one of the pint Pitkin sunbursts.

Photographs of archaeological digs at the Pitkin site, with images of the miniature chestnut flask in situ.

Early 20th century photograph of children playing on the Pitkin ruins, by John Knoll (1887-1955).

1965 oil painting of the Pitkin Glass Works by Nora Addy Drake, who also painted the (charmingly weird) murals at the nearby Shady Glen cheeseburger and milkshake joints.

 Admission to the Old Manchester Museum is by donation ($5 suggested). It's well worth a trip if you can catch the Museum during its open hours, particularly if you are interested in the rich lore surrounding what is perhaps America's most storied early glass factory.

Museum of Connecticut Glass August Open House

Set of the three sizes of Willington pickle bottles.

 This weekend there was another open house at the Museum of Connecticut Glass in Coventry. The weather was hot, sunny and humid, and this time of year half of the local population is probably on vacation at some mountain lake or Cape Cod beach house, so attendance was apparently down from previous events. Still, there was a pretty steady flow of visitors through the Museum.

Me in the Captain John Turner house, with some of the displays.

 The displays this time included figured flasks and other glass from eastern Connecticut glass works, with quite a few Coventry flasks that were of special interest to some of the neighbors of the Museum who stopped in at one point. The exhibit area in the Turner house stayed pleasantly cool for most of the day; the brick walls were constructed in an old English style and are very thick, so the building takes some time to heat up even on a sunny mid-August day.

Amber utility bottles: the whiskey cylinder (middle left) is embossed "Willington Glass Works," the demijohns and beer bottle are in the style of Willington glass, but could be from Westford or elsewhere in New England.

The Willington Glass Company had an extraordinarily long run, from 1815 to 1872, so it is somewhat surprising that the types of glassware that can be attributed to Willington with any degree of confidence are quite limited, and mostly date to the final 20-30 years of the company's operations. There are the well-known square cathedral pickle bottles, a couple of base-embossed cylindrical whiskey bottles, some late figured flasks with simplistic eagle designs, an electrical insulator, one variant of a sarsaparilla bottle, as well as paneled blueberry bottles and a few other styles of utilities that are generally associated with Willington. That's about it, aside from a few individual items linked to Willington by family tradition, for whatever that's worth. It seems as if for much of the history of the factory, production was dominated by generic unmarked demijohns, snuff bottles, beers, flasks etc., of types that could also have easily been made at any of a number of other New England glass works. It would be interesting if future archaeological investigations at the site could find evidence of other distinctive Willington products; one wonders if some of the early, pre-1840 figured flasks of unknown origin might have been made there. 

Sandwich Glass Museum

I was out on Cape Cod for the weekend earlier this month, and had a chance to visit the Sandwich Glass Museum. The Boston and Sandwich Glass Company (1825-1904, in various incarnations) is a bit outside of the scope of this blog, and outside of my own core antique glass competencies, but the museum was impressive and seemed worthy of a post.

Three mold decanters, hat-shaped salt cellars and more. Yes, there is apparently period documentation indicating that glass hat "whimseys," at least the Sandwich ones, were originally intended to hold table salt.

Almost all of the output from Boston and Sandwich was lead glass (a.k.a. flint glass or crystal), made with very pure silica sand imported from New Jersey, New York and the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. This recipe yielded a clear, perfectly colorless glass, that was used as-is to make some items, but frequently doped with metal salts to create a range of artificial colors. The Museum included an entertaining display with audio and some animatronic elements to explain the process of making colored glass.

Classic Sandwich Glass cologne bottles, bear-shaped pomade jars and whale oil lamps. Note the wooden pattern used to create the metal mold for a paneled cologne bottle, at upper left.

A case full of Sandwich paperweights, including some leftover glass flower parts that were never embedded.

Refined and delicate threaded glass tableware.

An imposing window display of larger Sandwich Glass items, including celery vases, lamps, bowls and candlesticks.

Shards excavated at the factory site, with interpretive signs matching them to extant antique glassware.

That's me working the press at the glassmaking demonstration area.

In addition to extensive displays of antique glass, a modern glass gallery, and special exhibits on various aspects of the workings of the glass factory at Sandwich, the Museum also has a functioning furnace for glass blowing. The gas-fired furnace is run continuously for years at a time, as it takes weeks to come up to temperature if it is shut down for maintenance. There is a single pot of glass inside, which the staff used to make a whimsey, a free blown tumbler and a pressed glass plate, all formed using traditional tools and techniques.

The Sandwich Glass Museum is a really impressive and informative source of information on nineteenth century glassmaking in Massachusetts. At some point in the future, I would hope that the Museum of Connecticut Glass could be developed to a similar level of excellence.

Museum of Connecticut Glass Open House

Free blown and dip mold New England glass.

 The Museum of Connecticut Glass held one of its monthly open houses this weekend. The Museum has a very limited, all-volunteer staff, but they are trying to have regular public educational events and shows during the warmer months. The main event for June was a spectacular display of early glassware and bottles from the collection of Tom Marshal. Tom has been acquiring his glass since the 1980s, and focuses on primitive free blown bottles and tableware, particularly forms and colors that can be associated with Connecticut, or at least the general New England area. Many of these objects are quite unusual and rare, and it was a treat to see so many in one place. Tom and other Museum volunteers gave informative talks about antique glass and glassmaking, and there was also a bottle sales area set up to benefit the Museum.

Bruce Mitchell and Alan Lagocki talk about glass making and early glass factories in Connecticut in the Museum's barn display area. The famous $3 bottle tables are by the window, with some real bargains to be had.

More of Tom Marshal's pre-1840 Connecticut-ish tableware, utilities and unique "end-of-day" items, in the kitchen window of the Capt. John Turner house.

A small display of later 19th and early 20th Century decorative glass, mostly made by the Meriden Flint Glass Company, from Bruce Mitchell's collection.

Freeblown and pattern molded inkwells, attributable to the Pitkin Glass Works or possibly other contemporaneous Connecticut factories. The "Pitkin hat" at left is a bit cracked, but one of the few known examples of an exceedingly rare and desirable end-of-day type item.