About a decade ago, Jack Paquette began researching the histories of some long-gone glassmakers.
A couple of years into his research, he came to a disturbing conclusion: The available books and articles couldn't be relied on for accuracy.
“There's so much fiction in the glass industry,” said Mr. Paquette, a 77-year-old retired executive of Toledo's Owens-Illinois, Inc. “What I decided was that a lot of authors were copying each other and repeating errors.”
He discovered another problem: Many glass companies known to exist in northwest Ohio at one time had never been written about in books.
“I kept discovering glass companies nobody had heard of,” said Mr. Paquette, who retired as an O-I vice president and assistant to the chairman in 1984, after 33 years with the glassmaker.
So, he decided to do original research, the hard way - by poring through century-old trade journals, and newspapers, and boards of directors' minutes.
The result is a prodigious reference book, Blowpipes: Northwest Ohio Glassmaking in the Gas Boom of the 1880s, a 550-page tome that includes nearly 100 pages of footnotes, source notes, and bibliography.
Among the sources are many northwest Ohio newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s - including The Blade (known then as the Toledo Blade) - and such obscure trade publications as Crockery & Glass Journal and Pottery & Glassware Reporter.
Mr. Paquette is happy he chose to do original research. “If you don't agree with my facts, you can go to the source and read it [for yourself],” he explained.
He found that more than 70 glass factories - he calls them glasshouses - sprang up in northwest Ohio between 1886 and 1900, giving the region a true claim to be called the “glass center of the world.”
Mr. Paquette said glassmaking is America's oldest industry, dating to 1607 at the Jamestown settlement.
By 1880, Pittsburgh would be the center of glassmaking, with 44 factories, a number that northwest Ohio would top in the next two decades, mostly because of the oil-and-gas boom that began in 1885 with an oil well in Lima.
Before long, wells dotted the northwest Ohio landscape.
And even though the gas began to run out in five years and the boom lasted just 35 years in all, the short-lived phenomenon had a major impact on the glass industry.
The author uncovered the histories of 24 glass factories in Findlay alone, 15 in Fostoria, seven in Tiffin, and seven in Bowling Green.
Toledo, which is often tagged “glass capital of the world,” was home to five glass factories in the late 19th century - but one, the Libbey glass works, was huge, and became one of the few survivors.
As recently as 1980, five of the original 70-plus companies were still making glass, but three disappeared in the 1980s: Tiffin Glass Co. and Fostoria's Seneca Glass Co. and Fostoria Glass Co.
That left just Libbey - originally the New England Glass Co. (also known as W. L. Libbey & Son Glass Co.), which Edward Drummond Libbey moved to Toledo from Boston in 1888 - and the remnants of the Edward Ford Plate Glass Co., which began in Rossford in 1898.
(Mr. Paquette notes that the town's name probably comes from Mr. Ford's last name and the maiden name of his second wife, Caroline Ross; however, it also could have come from the name of their son, George Ross Ford.)
The plate-glass firm later became part of Libbey-Owens-Ford Co., now known as Pilkington North America.
Gone are such 19th century firms as Maumee Glass Co.; Findlay's Hirsch-Ely Window Glass Co. and Bellaire Goblet Co.; the Fostoria Incandescent Lamp Co.; the North Baltimore Bottle Glass Co.; Bowling Green's Canastota Window Glass Co., and Toledo's Glassboro Novelty Glass Co., a short-lived maker of glass bathtubs and coffins.
Many firms were enticed to open up factories by generous incentives, said Mr. Paquette.
“Talk about tax abatement!” he said. “Many of those companies were built with public money - free land, free gas, up to $50,000 in bonus money, and very seldom did the contracts involve any guarantees.”
Even though most of the early glass factories disappeared, the survivors and also executives from some of the failed firms kept glass as a vital industry in the area.
Two of the area's Fortune 500 firms started after the oil-and-gas heyday - what is now O-I began in 1903, and 35 years later it created Owens Corning.
For Mr. Paquette, the book was a labor of love.
He said he spent seven days a week for nine years researching and writing the book, published last month by Xlibris Corp.
Mr. Paquette describes himself as a “hunt-and-peck” typist who prefers to write longhand. He hired a typist to furnish the manuscript. The cover and illustrations are by local commercial artist Jim Brower.
He included material on glassmaking technology in the 1880s and the child labor it encouraged, which he calls the “scourge of the late 19th century.”
He noted that thousands of young boys worked as helpers in the glass factories of that era, including Toledoan Michael J. Owens, who started working at the age of 10 in West Virginia.
The inventive Mr. Owens helped to end child labor in the industry by perfecting automated glassmaking machinery, especially his automatic bottle-blowing machine that pretty much ended the use of the blowpipes that gave Mr. Paquette's book its name.
Mr. Paquette has written other books on the glass industry: The Glassmakers and A History of Owens-Illinois, Inc., 1818-1984.
But he might never have gained expertise in the industry except for serendipity.
He lived in East Toledo as a child and was placed in the former Miami Children's Center in Maumee at the age of 8 during the Great Depression when his father, a widower, could no longer care for him and two brothers.
He served in the Navy in World War II and got a master's degree from Ohio State University thanks to the GI Bill.
After a stint as a newspaper reporter in Columbus, he decided he didn't want a career in journalism. He was offered an interview with two O-I executives who were recruiting in Columbus in 1951.
“I had never heard of the company,” said Mr. Paquette.
First Published September 24, 2002, 10:28 a.m.
