The Berkshire Glass works (review)

Referred to as lithos chyte or “cast stone” by the Greeks, glass was from the first made in imitation of precious stones. Known to date from at least the third millennium BCE, when it was produced in Egypt and Babylon as tiny pieces of jewel-like inlay found in ceremonial beakers, pectorals, Ushabti figures, scepters and crowns, glass in antiquity was associated with royalty, sacred functions and burials. Paraded as booty in triumphal processions and collected among the Romans, glass was more prized than precious metals and worked in techniques that ranged from gilding and faceting to engraving and beveling. It was valued extraordinarily high, in part due to its delicacy and fragility. One legend has it that when a glass-maker offered the Emperor Nero an object of unbreakable glass, Nero, who considered the loss of glass’s fragility a threat to the value of silver and gold, had the craftsman exiled and his workshop destroyed.

William Patriquin and Julie Sloan’s book The Berkshire Glass Works presents a history of one of the dozens of Massachusetts glasshouses that sprang up during the course of the 19th century in America: the Berkshire Glass Works (BGW) factory, located in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, a small town just north of Pittsfield in a section of the Housatonic valley that affords a prospect on the Berkshire hills. During the 1870s, this factory became the first to produce colored cathedral glass and was also one of the earliest in America to blow antique glass to be used in the creation of stained-glass windows. Reflecting a renewed appreciation of window glass that originated earlier in the century in France and England, where windows were deemed to be an integral part of architecture, stained glass was appreciated for its radiance and spiritual significance. This led to Gothic revivals of medieval prototypes, pictorial subjects and painterly styles found among Romantic artists such as members of the Nazarene Movement. During the Gilded Age, at the height of American industrial expansion, numerous studios and workshops sprang up throughout New England, where larger establishments employed as many as 300 glass workers at a time, each specializing in a particular process. Glass production as a decorative art peaked in the Aesthetic Movement during the 1870s and 1880s, following trends that had originated in Europe a decade earlier. By the turn of the century, colored glass came also to be used by followers of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, first in Britain and then in America by such figures as John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany.

In its broadest contours, this book presents the history of a significant American glassworks establishment integral to the production of stained glass in 19th-century America and the formidable attributes of character, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and craftsmanship that contributed to its rise. Part I opens with a geological survey of the unique natural resources of the area—the white sand beds of Northern Berkshire County, formed along the shores of the Iapetus Ocean during the Cambrian Age, whose sands were of such incomparable purity that “manufactories” as far as Liverpool and Le Havre considered its “dazzling whiteness” the finest ever used in the production of glass.

The first half of the book describes the stages and operations of antique glass production, which included the melting of mineral batch to molten glass (referred to as metal) in furnaces within clay pots before it was gathered into cylinders, blown, capped, and flattened, then rolled into panes of plate glass. It chronicles the passage of ownership from the company’s co-founders through the partnerships of Page & Robbins (1858–1863) and Page & Harding (1863–1883) with detailed, often fascinating biographies of its principals and affiliates. Drawing on transcripts, minutes, advertisements, reports, newspaper articles, ledger extracts, journals and many other critical sources, the book describes the evolution of technologies applied, modified and invented, including the composition of compounds, firing temperatures, thicknesses of glass, shipping...