Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/615

 Rh made possible our own plentiful output of beautiful and inexpensive tableware, as well as of artistic panels used in transoms and elsewhere. The pressed glass is not, of course, so brilliant as the cut, but it has the merit of costing less than one twentieth as much, and therefore of being within the reach of all. Later, the glass works were operated by the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, and enjoyed quite a boom during the civil war. The stock commanded a ready market and became one of the conservative investments in which careful Bostonians took pleasure in putting their money. Since then operations have not been continuous, but the enterprise is still represented. After the war the glass industry in Massachusetts dwindled sadly until, in 1880, there were only five flint-glass houses and one window-glass factory in operation in the entire State. The cause of this decline was largely due to lack of fuel, and also in part to the pressure of other industries for which the locality is better adapted.

Massachusetts must, however, always hold a prominent place in the annals of American glass-making, both because of her service in developing the plate-glass manufacture and the possibilities of pressed glass, and still more because she has now within her borders the most noted of American workshops for glass. The lens-grinding establishment of Alvan Clark and Sons, at Cambridgeport, is known wherever the science of astronomy is cultivated. Its achievements in producing the glass for the Russian Imperial Observatory at Pulkowa and the giant lens for the Lick Observatory in California are still in mind. The contributions of the State must, therefore, be measured by intellectual standards rather than by avoirdupois or dollars and cents.

In other parts of New England the development of the industry has been exceedingly moderate. New Hampshire seems to have been an asylum for the disgruntled glass-makers of Massachusetts. Since the times when Robert Hewes betook himself to Temple and the Middlesex workers removed to Pembroke, the forests of the State have been fatal allurements to those across the line. Few, if any, of these northern migrations proved successful. The works established at Keene, in 1814, for the manufacture of window glass continued in operation until the middle of the century, but appear to have been a losing venture in the hands of the several parties who attempted to run them. The bottle factory established in the same town, in 1817, was somewhat more prosperous, but in 1848 succumbed to the same enemy which attends all such industries, a lack of sufficient fuel. At the time of the tenth census the bottle-house at South Lyndeborough was the only glass factory in the State.

The development of the industry in the other New England States has been correspondingly meager. In recent times there