Glassmaking

German glassmakers played a significant role in the establishment of the industry in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although most of the glass needed in the colonies was imported from England, English glassblowers were reluctant to migrate overseas, and central European craftspeople, who were more inclined to cross the Atlantic on account of economic conditions and traditions of migration, manned most of the dozen or so glasshouses established before 1776.

Thus German glassmakers have been identified in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, and manufacturers from central Europe organized several important glassworks in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Their works produced basic items like bottle and window glass as well as fine tableware, the remaining examples of which have become high-priced collector’s items and are exhibited in major American museums.

Of the eight Germans who arrived in Virginia in 1608, five were glassmakers. A glasshouse was built about a mile from Jamestown fort, and some glass was shipped back to England at the end of the year. Production seems to have increased in 1609 but then was disrupted by high mortality among the Jamestown settlers, lack of provisions, and the infant colony’s first war with the local Powhatan Indians. During the winter of 1609 to 1610, the European population dropped from about 500 to 60, and most of or all the glassmakers were among the casualties.

More sustained efforts to establish glass manufacturing in British North America were undertaken in the eighteenth century. In 1738 Caspar Wistar (Wuster), an immigrant from the Palatinate who had become a successful Philadelphia merchant, purchased a tract of land in Salem County, New Jersey, and financed the migration of four master glassmakers to America. It has been suggested that Wistar learned about the requirements for glassmaking during his youth in the Heidelberg area, where his father, in his capacity as the Palatine elector’s chief huntsman and forester, had monitored the supply of building materials and fuel to the Peterstal glassworks.

Wistar and the German glassmakers formed a partnership, the United Glass Company, and started to produce bottles and windowpanes. The products of the Wistarburg works, which also included tablewares and electrical tubes like the ones Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse used for their scientific experiments, were sold in Wistar’s Philadelphia store. Additional glassmakers were subsequently recruited through Wistar’s business associates in Germany. At the time of his death in 1752, Wistar left one of the largest estates in the middle colonies. His son Richard, who also imported glass of superior quality from England, continued the enterprise until the Revolutionary War, when his fortunes rapidly declined. Although some glassmakers from Wistarburg established their own businesses, others went on to work for other manufacturers.

A quarter century after Wistar, Henry William Stiegel, who had arrived in Pennsylvania in 1750 and was operating an iron furnace in Elizabeth Township, Lancaster County, in partnership with the merchants Charles and Alexander Stedman, established his own glassworks. Five German glassblowers, at least one of whom came from Wistarburg, began producing bottle and window glass on the site of Elizabeth Furnace in 1763. After a trip to England on which he may have recruited additional workers, Stiegel built a glasshouse in the new town of Manheim near Lancaster, which he himself had founded two years earlier, in 1764 to 1765. After the British Parliament levied high duties on English glass imports in the 1767 Townshend Act, Stiegel expanded production and increasingly focused on high-quality tablewares that consciously imitated English styles.

With the help of the English craftsman John Allman, Stiegel was the first American manufacturer to produce lead glass (“flint glass”) around 1770, and he hired the Jewish engraver Lazarus Isaac to decorate his glassware in the latest English styles. Although Stiegel extensively advertised in colonial newspapers and marketed the products of his American Flint Glass Manufactory through merchants and shopkeepers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and several Pennsylvania backcountry towns, mounting debts caused him to declare bankruptcy in 1774.

At the time of American independence, glassworks were still rare in the United States, and growing demand not only stimulated rising imports from Germany and Bohemia but encouraged men like the brothers Amelung to venture into glass production there. In 1773 Anton Christian F. Amelung had leased the elector of Brunswick’s mirror glass manufactory “am Grunenplan” (on the green field) and his brother Johann Friedrich was working there as technical director. The Amelungs expanded production, increased the workforce from 48 to 116, and exported a considerable part of their products to Russia. Since 1783, however, increasing competition and higher Russian tariffs had brought the enterprise into financial difficulties, and Johann Friedrich journeyed to the United States to inquire about business opportunities there. Upon his favorable report, two merchant firms in Bremen agreed to cofinance the migration of glassmakers to America and the establishment of a glassworks. Armed with letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams, Johann Friedrich Amelung selected New Bremen in Frederick County as the site of the

works. He recruited craftsmen from Thuringia, Saxony, and Bohemia, but when he extended his activities to Lower Saxony the Brunswick government prohibited emigration in 1784, and Amelung was temporarily imprisoned. Despite official harassment, he was able to lead 68 workers to Baltimore. The Bremen firms put $10,000 and American investors an additional $15,000 into Amelung’s glassworks. The enterprise ran into difficulties within a few years because the Bremen merchants had overextended their means and American demand for the high-quality glassware that Amelung produced was still limited. After the U.S. Congress rejected Amelung’s request for a loan in 1790, production fell off and ceased some time afterward. Some of New Bremen’s employees subsequently founded their own workshops, and others worked for John Nicholson’s manufactory near Philadelphia (1794—1797) and Albert Gallatin’s New Geneva works in western Pennsylvania (1797—1807).

Mark Haberlein

Glassmaking

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