Difference between revisions of "Everett Glass Company"

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American Bottle Company plant in Newark in 1911

Known by various names during the course of its nearly sixty-year existence, the Everett Glass Company, or E.H. Everett Company, became a leading manufacturer of bottles and jars in the United States in the early twentieth century, with its focus on utilitarian glassware for commercial use. Founded as the Newark Star Glass Company in 1873 by local businessmen William Shields and Oren King, it was its subsequent owner, Edward Hamlin Everett, who would transform the company into a financial success, making it a bulwark of Newark's industrial development. Everett purchased the Newark Star Glass Company in 1880. A salesman from a young age, Everett expanded the company rapidly over the next decade and his glass company would become the linchpin of a broader entrepreneurial empire that made him fabulously wealthy. ^[1]

Newark's access to natural gas supplies and to a sand quarry at Black Hand Gorge made the area suited to glass manufacturing. Everett capitalized on these natural advantages and made investments in these resources, establishing ownership in these quarries and natural gas wells. These assets to his glass company, particularly the natural gas well, became successful businesses in their own right.

The company underwent a number of name changes as it expanded, changing from the Newark Star Glass Company to the E. H. Everett Glass Company to the Ohio Bottle Company, and the American Bottle Company. Located north of the downtown Newark at the corner of Oak and Clinton, the E.H. Everett Glass Works grew its production site over time, adding new facilities and p[periodically shutting down to improve its facilities. ^[2]. At its height in the early twentieth century, the grounds of the factory covered 25 acres and the company employed sixteen-hundred people. ^[3] The production site of the glass works was a collection of different facilities; in 1896 the complex had four factory buildings, a furnace, and a number of accompanying workshops and warehouses. ^[4] The American Bottle Company was able to produce three hundred million bottles in a year in 1907 and owned a number of subsidiary producers throughout the Midwest. The addition of twenty-seven Owens Bottle machines increased their production capacity. ^[5] Beer and soda bottles became the primary good produced by the company, but other utilitarian items made by Everett included canning and jam jars, large glass jugs with volumes ranging from a half gallon up to a fourteen gallons, as well as small bottles that would hold only four ounces of liquid. ^[6]

Everett Glass/American Bottle itself became a component of the Owens Bottle Machine Company in 1917 and would continue production as a subsidiary of Owens until 1929. The plant closed from 1930-1934, but would undergo yet another transformation and refit to become a production facility for the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation. ^[7]

For more information see:

Chessman, G. and Abbot, C. Edward Hamlin Everett, "The Bottle King". Granville, OH: Robbins Hunter Museum, 1991.

J.G.

References

1. ↑ Chessman and Abbott, Edward Hamlin Everett "The Bottle King," (1991), 4
2. ↑ Photographic History of Newark and Licking County, (1904), 10
3. ↑ Brister, E., The Ohio Magazine, (1907), 41
4. ↑ "Industrial Edition," The Newark Daily Advocate, Jun 30, 1896, 6
5. ↑ Spencer, C., The Ohio Magazine, (1907), 47-48.
6. ↑ "Industrial Edition," The Newark Daily Advocate, Jun 30, 1896, 7
7. ↑ Kingery, G., A Beginning, (1967), 78-79