By Frank Leone
One of Foggy Bottom’s earliest industries (1807-1846) was a glass-making factory located at 22nd Street and Water Street (now Constitution Avenue). At the time, the works conveniently bordered on the Potomac River, which facilitated delivery of raw materials and distribution of glass products. The works fostered the growth of a self-sustaining village, including housing, a company store, and a wharf. The area occupied part of the village of Funkstown and was near Jacob Funk’s house (between 22nd and 23rd Streets). The Glass House also was located near D.C.’s first brewery, Coningham’s Washington Brewery. Over the early part of the 19th Century, the Potomac River near the works silted up and East and West Potomac Parks were constructed on fill - The actual location of the Old Glass House (Square 89) now contains area north of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, south of the National Academy of Sciences.
The factory was established by brothers Andrew and George Way, only a few years after the U.S. capitol was re-located to Washington (1800). At this time, there were very few glass factories in America. Initially, the works contained ten furnaces and employed up to 125 men and boys, including skilled Bohemian glassblowers and free and likely enslaved African Americans. Some of the factory employees were slave owners. The factory primarily manufactured an especially transparent type of window glass which was sold as far away as far as Ohio and Illinois. The plant sometimes worked 24 hours and at its peak produced 300,000 square feet of glass per year. The glass house was opened to the public at times and the glass blowers would make special toys and “singing” or “whistling” bottles during the holidays.
Raw materials for glass-making were landed at the factory’s wharf and included sand – which originated from St. George Island, just down the Potomac in St. Mary’s County, Md. – and potash from the Philadelphia area. The factory consisted of a large brick barn-like blowing room at the east end, which contained the wood-burning furnaces for melting the raw materials. The molten glass was then blown into long cylinders, then cut and laid flat into sheets. (Learn more about early 19th Century glass making here and here.) To the west, the complex included the flattening house, the cutting room, the pot-room, the mixing-room and the box shop, all built of brick.
In 1819, the Way brothers decided to retire and put the works up for sale, but they continued to own the facility until bankruptcy in 1829. Andrew Way died, but George Way continued to manage the plant. In 1833 The federal government conveyed a strip of land south of the works for the construction of the Washington branch of the C&O canal. This provided canal access to the works, which continued in operation. The works closed down in approximately 1846, perhaps due to the silting of the river and the unwillingness of the proprietors of St. George Island to continue exporting their land. The buildings were later used for manufacture of lampblack (1860), roofing cement, and then fertilizer. The Western Presbyterian Church used one of the buildings for services in 1838. By the 1890s, the buildings were gone.
Sources: Robert H. Harkness, “The Old Glass-House,” Records of the Columbia Hist. Soc., 18:209-238 (1915); John Clagett Proctor, “Old Glass House Once Guarded Potomac Park Site,” Sunday Star, July 26, 1936; Mary K Manzoli, “The Old Glass House,” Foggy Bottom News, Dec. 1963; Suzanne Berry Sherwood, Foggy Bottom 1800-1975, A Study in the Uses of an Urban Neighborhood, GW Washington Studies No, 7, 1978; The Foggy Bottom History Project.
Комментарии