American glass at Corning.(Museum accessions)(Boston and Sandwich Glass Company)(Corning Museum of Glass)

In the history of American glass, the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company of Sandwich, Massachusetts, holds an important place. It was hardly the earliest glass manufactory, beginning only in 1825, nor the most expensive, nor the most highly specialized, but over some sixty years the firm produced many fine products. The manufactory was founded by the Boston businessman Deming Jarves, who was the son of a prosperous Boston cabinetmaker. With the money from his inheritance in 1817, Jarves first acquired with several other men the New England Glass Company of East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven years later he had a large new factory built on Cape Cod, where he established his own Boston and Sandwich Glass Company.

It is an understatement to say that Jarves was enamored of glass. He was not a glassmaker himself, but he made sure he knew all he could about its development, history, and manufacture. One of the areas in which he became directly involved at Sandwich was in the production of lighting devices. Sometimes one needs to be reminded how dark nights were in the past. Candles and oil lamps did not make much of a dent but they were essential and highly valued. The second quarter of the nineteenth-century saw enterprising inventors attempting to develop new burners and safety devices, and experimenting with different burning fluids. Meanwhile most lamps were fairly simple, although they varied widely in design and decoration. An early lighting object made by the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company is a candlestick (below left), recently acquired by the Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York. What makes it particularly interesting is that it corresponds to a drawing made by Jarves in a letter to his glasshouse superintendent William Stutson on January 20, 1829, just shortly after the company had managed its first pressing of tableware. Jarves requests that seven or eight dozen of these ...