Historical flasks pike's peak flask

ANOTHER "HISTORICAL FLASK ARTICLE" FROM THE PAGES OF

ANTIQUE BOTTLE AND GLASS COLLECTOR MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ANTIQUE BOTTLE COLLECTING HOBBY

As an obsessed student of glass produced in West Virginia I scoured Helen McKearin and Ken Wilson's 1978 classic AMERICAN BOTTLES & FLASKS for information on early products and factories from my state.

I found the expected Wheeling and Wellsburg flasks. And I found that all illusive passage on page 499 about the GXI-34 through GXI-36 “CEREDO” flasks. This is the passage Ken Wilson writes of Lowell Innis telling him that the late Earl Dambach of Pittsburgh told him (Innis now) of a possible connection between the CEREDO flasks and a small town in West Virginia, named Ceredo! If a researcher of glass wants a clue that challenges this was certainly one of the best! My search for Ceredo glass history has spanned over four years. It is a gratifying feeling to share the results of that search for the first time here, and to acknowledge that many folks made this conclusion possible.

The flasks that started this for me and for authors and collectors before me are Pike's Peak flasks of no great distinguishing characteristics, except that in the typically blank framed oval under the traveler the block letter spell out CEREDO. The mystery and challenge is in finding the “why” of that uncommon work being molded into the flask.

The Dambach report given to Innis told of an unpublished history in the Huntington Public Library (assumable in Huntington WV the largest town a few miles from downtown Ceredo). My inquiry at the library in 1992 met with no knowledge of any such manuscript. That exhausted the Innis clue.

Next steps were to systematically inquire of anyone doing work related to glass or glass history in the area. Questions were directed to the Huntington Museum of Art, well known for an impressive glass collection, to the Glass Club of Huntington, local collectors, the local county courthouse, and local historical museum.

A tip from the Huntington Museum of Art librarian, Chris Hatten, led to microfilm newspapers from the early town of Ceredo. The newspapers were at the University of Virginia. Ceredo, Virginia was not to become West Virginia until 1863 amidst the turmoil of the American Civil War. The president of the Glass Club of Huntington was traveling that way and would gladly seek the reference. Fortunately he returned with a readable photocopy of The Ceredo Crescent of 8 October 1860, being volume III number 43. On page two thereof we had our first proof of a glass factory at Ceredo:

The Glass Factory is completed and ready for beginning work. They are to commence “blowing”, Monday week. The business employees altogether some more than twenty-five men at present, and more will be at work there hereafter we suppose. We believe the proprietors will begin making glass wine bottles, vials, bottles for common use, and various descriptions of jars so much used now-a-days.

The business adds much to the general prosperity of the Town and the working capital of the country. Three new families of ten persons arrived here from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, week before last. Several workmen for the factory have arrived within twelve days.

Our people have reason to rejoice that manufacturing has been successfully initiated thus far, and promises to continue successfully, and be a profit to the proprietors. We have always advocated the establishment of manufacture in this place, believing that almost any kind would do well, and that a variety would ultimately build up a large city here.

No further contemporary accounts have been found...yet. The next evidence is an account from an unidentified published source. It is noted as number X June 13, 1882. The author is identified only as “by an Old Settler”. This reference is titled Abinitio Links in the Chain of the History of the Town of Ceredo. This account is roughly 22 years after the glass factory opened. In part it reads:

“After the shock received by the financial embarrassment (sic) of 1857, the prospects for Ceredo had never been as hopeful as at the opening of 1860... Prior to that time Samuel Sanders of R.I. who controlled the title to about 50,000 acres of land in Wayne and Cabell Counties had his headquarters at Guyandotte, but coming convinced that Ceredo has a great future in prospect, removed here, and associated with him Mess. McFarlin & Gardner of R.I. and early in the season commenced construction of a glass factory.”

The erection of the factory employed several stone and brick masons and carpenters most of the season, and besides these they had quite a force busy cutting cord wood and cutting, piling and burning brush and limbs for the purpose of making ashes of which they had several thousand bushels. Also several hundred cords of wood when they began making glass. The sand used in the manufacture was found on the south bank of Jordan Branch, about a hundred yards from it mouth, and proved to be of excellent quality for the purpose. Sanders had no experience in glass making, but his acquaintance with the citizens enabled him to secure labor rates profitable alike to workman and employer. McFarlin was not only familiar with the manufacture, but competent to superintend the building of the factory in all its parts and seemed to be in the happiest mood when doing what would admirably keep two or three men busy, that is, in keeping the various machines in harmony and so employed as to push the work ahead in the shortest period of time. Dr. Gardner (Benjamin E. Gardner according to a deed from Sanders to Gardner, author's note) was an accomplished scholar, geology, mineralogy, and chemist being favorite studies, thereof he was (a) valuable member of the company. It was from him that they learned the sand of the right kind could be so conveniently obtained, and it was from him that they learned when a load of ashes had too much of the sacred soil in it to make good glass, and on him they had to see that the clay was of the right kind and properly sized for the making of the pots, in which the raw material is subjected to the intense heat which reduces it to glass. The company thus demonstrated during the first few months of their business that not only glass of good quality could be made at Ceredo, but that it could be made at Ceredo, but that it could be profitably made.

Their ability to demonstrate so soon that it could be profitably made, grew out of a condition of things, that it is to be hoped may never occur again.

Author's Note: The following passage, if a bit lengthy, tells a significant story of the involvement of the glass industry in the American Civil War. I pondered editing it, but believe the telling in the 1880's of such a view is a major piece of the Ceredo story and a much larger story we seldom hear. Please bear with me as the earlier author continues.

“As will be remembered by those old enough to recall the events of 1860, a class of men mostly from the Northern States, with a few from the South who believed the abolition of the Missouri compromise unjust, and the fugitive slave law an insult, met at Chicago on the 16th of May and nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the presidency. That action so exasperated many southern men that when the democratic convention met in Baltimore a few weeks later most for the delegate(ion) from the south, with a few from the north declined to concur in the nomination of Stephen A. Douglas as their candidate, and withdrew from the convention. By mutual agreement they met in Charleston, S.C. a few days later and put in nomination John C. Breckenridge as their candidate, on a platform not only declaring the right of the master to take and hold slaves in all the territories of the United States, but to demand the service of citizens of the free states to capture and return the slavery and slave escaping to said free state.”

Sectional strife being thus, exasperated many of the southern political conventions of 1860 passed resolutions devising, and in some cases demanding, of the southern merchants a withdrawal of commercial intercourse with the north.

Among those following such suggestions were many of the former patrons of the Pittsburgh glass manufactory, who promptly transferred their patronage to the Ceredo Co., as it was located within the “Old Dominion” (Virginia). Thus though the price of glass was not increased above what the Pittsburgh manufacturers had been receiving, it gave the Ceredo Co. a ready market for all they could make, and proved to them that the profits were so large that they were planning to largely increase their means to production for the summer of 1861, but the calamities of war ruined their business as it did most industrial enterprises in the border states south of the Mason and Dixon's line.

Wow. I had now gathered much more than the simple story of one glass factory. Here was a glimpse into regionalism and a divided country on the eve of the War. What I now had was a rough idea that the company had operated quite successfully but for only a time from late 1860, around October, until “the simmer of 1861”.

This passage is lengthy and appears as part of a larger accounting of industry in Ceredo circa 1860. As I lack specific references for it I wonder if it may not have been the same manuscript that Dambach saw and told Innis about, who told Wilson?

The final note found thus far affirming the company is a reflective piece, very romantic in style, that appeared in the Ceredo Advance issue of 23 June 1915. It reads thus:

“Some time since, I stood in old Ceredo, and retrospection, was in the long ago. Again I could see the busy people at work down where the match factory and glass works were in full blast; where once our father took us and they gave my sister a glass globe and presented me with a pint bottle, on which was blown the picture of a man with a staff and a bundle on his back, lettered “Ho, for Pike's Peak.” The site is again a corn field, and I wonder what became of all those people. I can tell where some went---the Civil War--but cannot tell when or who came back. Some of them lightly turned the corner of a street and went out of sight forever.”

I can now with confidence conclude that there was a glass factory in Ceredo (West) Virginia on the eve of the Civil War. It reportedly did make a Pike's Peak flask, even if our author writing 45 years later was unclear of the caption.

And, the factory was a victim, in some way, of the Civil War. It seems certainly it suffered a disruption of production and labor, likely transportation would have been difficult if not impossible. I hear oral tradition that the factory itself was destroyed or badly impaired by the war or some guerrilla activity. That remains to be clarified.

What I write in closing with considerable confidence is that those mysterious Ceredo flasks were indeed, as Ken Wilson so wisely wanted to believe, made in Ceredo, West Virginia.

Acknowledgments: An article of this sort is not a one man research. Many have shared my enthusiasm, perhaps at best I have been a catalyst and now the reporter of our shared discovery. I wish to thank Ken Wilson, Don Smith, Robert McKeand, Eason Eiger, and Chris Hatten, and James McCreery for the GXI-34 Ceredo flask drawing, American Bottles & Flasks and Their Ancestry, Helen McKearin and Kenneth M. Wilson, p. 641, Crown Publishers, Inc. In part the enthusiasm stirred by our discovery is responsible for the recent addition of a Ceredo Flask to the collection of the Huntington Museum of Art. How anxious we are now to seek other information or products of this nearly lost glass company.

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