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Toledoans lured a new industry in the late 1800s

Toledoans lured a new industry in the late 1800s

The story of how the glass industry came to Toledo is one of desperation. Of brashness, vision, contrast. But at its heart, it s a romance.

In 1887, Toledo s glass industry was nonexistent.

In East Cambridge, Mass., the New England Glass Co., owned by the Libbey family, started to fall on hard times. A shortage of fuel to fire furnaces that turned sand into molten glass and problems with the skilled workers who blew, spun, and shaped the malleable substance into bottles, bowls, and other assorted tableware plagued the once-prosperous company.

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Edward Drummond Libbey, 24, had inherited these problems from his just-deceased father, and things were looking grim.

Then came word of the discovery of a new, inexpensive, abundant, readily available fuel: natural gas. Trouble was, this gas was in the Midwest, far from New England.

But if the gas couldn t come to New England, then perhaps New England could go to the gas. And one of the gas centers was courting new business.

Somewhat serendipitously, a Toledo businessman s association advertised in the newspapers that they would like to bring a business to the city, said James Marshall, manager of the local history and genealogy department at the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. Mr. Libbey read the ad, contacted the association, and was invited to Toledo.

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The Toledo businessmen offered Mr. Libbey four acres and $100,000 to build both a factory and housing for 50 workers.

Mr. Libbey wasn t sold on the notion until he looked out a window, which, given that that s among the glass items his company would eventually make, is again serendipitous.

As the story goes, Mr. Marshall said, Libbey saw a young lady walking by. He asked who she was. One of the businessmen said it was Florence Scott, Jessup Scott s granddaughter.

Jessup Scott was a prominent Toledoan who founded the University of Toledo. Libbey was asked if he d like to sit next to her at a dinner that night, Mr. Marshall said.

They met and things worked out on two fronts. In August, 1888, Mr. Libbey brought his workers and equipment to Toledo. In 1891, he and Florence Scott married. It s often said that if she hadn t been walking by that window, Mr. Marshall said, this wouldn t be the glass capital.

The couple later helped launch the Toledo Museum of Art and became its major benefactors.

There is nothing in any literature of the day to suggest that s how they met, countered another glass industry historian and published author, Jack Paquette. Libbey s move here was strictly sound business judgment, said Mr. Paquette, who retired in 1984 as vice president and assistant to the chairman of Owens-Illinois, a glass company spun off from Mr. Libbey s initial industry and still based in the Toledo area.

At the start, Mr. Libbey s business judgment seemed inspired. Some 250 New England glass workers and their families were welcomed at the train station in Toledo with much civic fanfare. Despite the warm welcome and the new start at the Ash Street plant, within three months many of those first workers grew homesick and left.

Mr. Libbey recruited new workers in West Virginia, which also had a burgeoning glass industry. He had filled his quota when in walked a well-dressed young man whose rough hands were testimony to hard work. The young man said he would make a good shop foreman, but Mr. Libbey said he already had hired one. The young man persisted, selling himself as a quality blower of glass who had started in the industry as a child. Child labor was prevalent in the glass industry then. Mr. Libbey took a liking to the brash, determined, forthright young man, and so Michael Owens was hired.

Edward Libbey and Michael Owens are a study in contrasts, said Barbara Floyd, director of general libraries at the University of Toledo. Mr. Libbey was the cultured, East Coast businessman born into wealth. Mr. Owens was the street-savvy, unschooled, West Virginian who had a vision of how to improve the making of glass products and was a forceful leader in the workplace.

Mr. Owens soon took charge on the production floor and, with Mr. Libbey s support, the New England Glass Co. turned around. In 1892 the name changed to Libbey Glass Co.

The two of them together were dynamic, said Robert Zollweg, director of design for Libbey Glass and an expert on the company s history. They had a synergy that few exceptional people have. One [Libbey] knew where he wanted the company to go and the other [Owens] knew how to get there.

In 1895 the two founded the Toledo Glass Co. to make glass in a sheet, a departure from bulbs for the growing electric-light industry of Thomas Edison, and bottles. It became the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Co. in 1916.

Mr. Owens also was experimenting with a machine to make bottles more quickly and economically. This was quite a leap forward because glass making of all kinds was pretty much the same as it had been in ancient Egypt blown and shaped by hand with child labor. In 1902, with Mr. Libbey s support, Mr. Owens perfected a bottle-making machine and started a company to market it to other glass makers. The Owens Bottle Machine Co. later began using its own machines and, in 1913, was commended by the National Child Labor Committee for eliminating child labor. It became simply the Owens Bottle Co. in 1919.

Mr. Owens died in 1923; Mr. Libbey, two years later. The companies they formed lived on and evolved.

In 1929, the Owens Bottle Co. bought one of its most productive customers of its bottle-making machines, Illinois Glass Co., forming Owens-Illinois Glass.

In 1930, Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Co. of Rossford to form Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Co.

In 1938, Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works, both of which spun glass into fibers, joined forces to establish a new company, Owens Corning Fiberglas Corp.

And the root of this all, Libbey Glass, endures after being spun off as a separate company in 1993 from O-I.

What is remarkable, and an epilogue to the story of how the Toledo glass industry began, Mr. Paquette said, is that of the more than 70 glass companies that operated in northwest Ohio from 1883 to the early 1900s, only those four have survived. And not just survived, but have thrived here. In a sense, Mr. Paquette said, this is still the Glass City.

(For more on the history of Toledo s glass industry, see Time in a Bottle: A History of Owens-Illinois, Inc., an exhibition Sept. 20-Dec. 29 at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University Libraries of the University of Toledo.)

Contact Dennis Bova at: bova@theblade.com or 419-724-6164.

First Published August 18, 2006, 7:25 p.m.

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Florence Scott Libbey
A shop foreman named Michael Owens, right, played a key role in turning around Mr. Libbey s company, which in 1892 became Libbey Glass.
Workers get down to business in 1938 at the Libbey Glass factory in Toledo.
Edward Drummond Libbey
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