Plain Glass to Artistry:
A History of the
New England Glass Company

When the Boston Porcelain and glass Company built a factor in East Cambridge in 1814, the village was little more than a gridwork of streets laid out by land speculators. Although the company failed, it helped initiate a collective migration of Boston Companies, which continued throughout the Industrial Revolution. More important, though, the empty factory attracted the attention of Amos Binney, Edmund Munroe, Daniel Hastings, and Deming Jarves, who in 1818 established there the New England glass Company.

The new factory, with two flint furnaces, 24 steam-operated glass-cutting mills, and a red-lead furnace, produced all manner of plan, molded and cut glass. As the company prospered, becoming the top employer in East Cambridge, the streets began to fill with the homes of skilled glass blowers, laborers, and their families; in 1823 the population of East Cambridge reached 1,000. Few children were enrolled in school, however, for they were apprenticed to the new company. For instance, Thomas Leighton, an early "gaffer," or superintendent, had five sons working in the factory. Thomas Jr. was a blower of chemical wares, James worked in a mold shop, Peter and Robert were blowers of tablewares, and John took over his father's job as gaffer. John's son went on to be one of the company' top engravers.

Through the 1820s, the New England Glass Company looked beyond the banks of the Charles. The company exhibited at the Washington Exhibition, won a Franklin Institute award for "skill and ingenuity," and established agencies in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Then, with the innovation of pressed glass, the fact of the industry changed. While the origins of the technique are probably European, American glass manufacturers, specifically those at the New England Glass Company, were among the first to understand its potential. To make pressed glass, a fix amount of molten glass was poured into a mold and then pressed with a plunger to take on a specific shape. Ground and polished, the finished product could be nearly as smooth as blown glass. Pressed glass was later made entirely by machine, making it more affordable.

The glass industry was the top employer in Cambridge in 1845 and again in 1855, when two companies, New England and Bay State, employed more than 500 people. But there was trouble ahead. In 1864 William Leighton, the son of Thomas and former employee of the New England Glass Company, discovered the formula for lime glass, a cheaper glass ideally suited for tableware. The New England Glass Company continued to make the more expensive flint glass and experienced still competition as a result. In addition, glass manufacturers were sprouting up in the Midwest next to coal fields, whereas New England had to import coal at a substantial cost.

No longer able to survive on increasing production, the New England Glass Company returned to its early reliance on quality and skilled artistry. Critical to this renaissance was the hiring of the engraver Louis Vaupel, who joined New England Glass in 1856. Trained in Germany, Vaupel was a technical master whose work exemplified the new realistic and naturalistic movements in the fine arts. Beautiful designs and exotic colors, difficult to produce in bulk, became the company's signature. Through the 1860s and 1870s, cut and engraved products and extraordinary paperweight became a mainstay.

In the 1880s natural gas was discovered in the Midwest, making it an even greater draw for glass manufacturers. No longer able to compete with Midwestern giants and troubled with a labor strike, the New England Glass Company closed its doors in 1888 and joined the exodus westward, moving to Toledo, Ohio, where it is now the Libbey Glass Division of Owens-Illinois, Inc.

(From Cambridge on the Cutting Edge, a publication of the Cambridge Historical Society)