At the heart of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (PPG) was a thriving community of Belgian immigrants. During World War I, masses of Belgian refugees came to the United States, as their home country was torn apart by warfare. Belgium was a historical hub for glassmaking, a trade many immigrants brought with them to America. Belgian glassmakers typically settled in rural areas rich with the necessary natural resources for glassmaking, setting up family-run production studios. These small-time glassmakers would move from town to town as limited materials for glassmaking began to dwindle. Mount Vernon, however, offered Belgian glassmakers a more settled lifestyle, as PPG provided steady work throughout the year. Immigrants quickly rose up through the ranks, their specialized knowledge of glassmaking techniques leading to the creation of several of PPG’s glassmaking patents.

While cities across the nation benefit from the cultural revitalization that urban parks can bring, Ariel-Foundation Park is distinct in its kind. This is due in part to the rich history and rural location of Mount Vernon. The culture of the city has deep roots in its agricultural and industrial past, and Ariel-Foundation Park was built in honor of this history. The construction of Ariel-Foundation Park has the potential to revitalize the community, attract businesses, improve property values, and increase access to health and wellness opportunities.

Glass is made from three simple ingredients: sand, soda ash, and limestone. If sand is heated to its melting point, its properties change and create glass. By adding soda ash, the melting point is slightly lower, which makes the process more cost-efficient. Finally, limestone is added to make the material more stable—without the addition of limestone, the glass material would dissolve in water. Glass is a particularly interesting material because it is difficult to classify as a solid, liquid, or gas. Molecularly, it is closer to a liquid but appears solid. For this reason, it is sometimes called a frozen liquid.   

PPG worker Phillip Kempton was born in nearby Mount Liberty, Ohio, and attended school in Centerburg before taking up glassmaking as an occupation. In 1961 Kempton joined his father and brother at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Along with his brother, he produced clay for the tank kiln, repairing and maintaining it when necessary. Though the job was dangerous and the hours were long, Phillip enjoyed his job and felt a sense of pride and camaraderie with his co-workers. When the plant was shut down, Kempton and his co-workers had to seek other job opportunities.

The protective clothing worn by glass workers was designed to protect the body from burns, punctures, and cuts. The glass workers at the PPG plant in Mount Vernon wore denim safety sleeves that protected from heat and were reinforced with grommets, to provide ventilation and prevent glass puncture. The sleeves were held in place by alligator clips on the chest that attached both sides of the sleeves together.

Built in 1945, the Carpenter Shop is one of the few remaining buildings from the Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant (PPG). With original glass windows made on-site, the shop features panoramic views of the factory ruins. The carpentry crew—made up of around a dozen men—would repair anything in the factory made of wood. Additionally, the carpentry crew built custom wooden crates to transport sheet glass around the world. Having a carpenter shop on-site expedited the shipping process and was more time and cost-effective when machinery broke down. Typical tasks of a carpenter included cutting, working, and joining timber, as well as creating scaffolds for other buildings on-site.

One of the essential jobs of the carpentry crew was making extremely precise maple rulers for the glass cutters. Lloyd Hull, a 31-year employee of PPG, described the carpentry shop as a lively environment, full of both danger and camaraderie. Workers had to adhere to strict rules regarding safety and the operation of shop tools and equipment. Even with proper protocol, accidents still happened—Hull once gashed his hand while operating a mechanical saw. However, the shop had its fair share of good times. Hull recalled that “every once in a while some joker would hang somebody’s long johns from the rafters.” Today, the Carpenter Shop can be rented for small private gatherings.

Sources

Keirns, Aaron J. Ariel-Foundation Park. Mt. Vernon, OH: Foundation Park
Conservancy, 2015.

"Community Foundation Pavilion." Ariel-Foundation Park. Accessed February 22, 2017. http://www.arielfoundationpark.org/index.php/explore-the-park/community-foundation-pavilion#.

When Jacob Coxey came to Ohio to build a steel casting plant, he “hit Mount Vernon with the effect of a small bomb,” according to the Mount Vernon News. Made with steel trusses shipped from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 on circus cars, the Coxey Building measured an immense 175 ft. by 510 ft. Great enthusiasm erupted from the business community at the time, with improved value of real estate beckoning. Unfortunately, obstacles to progress and profit quickly surfaced. Construction was often halted due to digging and hitting water. For structural reasons, the building was covered in brick, with the innovative use of cement as mortar. However, once running, the steel plant consistently produced sub-quality steel. The Coxey steel plant failed and brought businesses down with it in 1902.

Due to its proximity to natural gas reserves and sand quarries, Leopold Mambourg and James A. Chambers transformed the building into a glass factory. Though its construction cost $300,000, the Coxey Building was sold for $60,717 and renamed Mambourg Window Glass Company. Raising the standard for glass production, the company eventually invented the Pennvernon process, named after its ties to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and creation in Mount Vernon. In 1906, Chambers took ownership of the company and renamed it Chambers Window Glass Company, only to have PPG take over two years later. After almost 70 years of creating state-of-the-art glass, the company closed in 1976.

“Panic of 1893” at Ohio History Central: http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Panic_of_1893

The Coxey Building Ruins, one of the centerpieces of Ariel-Foundation Park, were originally built to be a steel-casting plant. The building’s namesake, Jacob Coxey, made waves when he built the huge factory complex in the early 1900s, but it never became the booming steel plant he envisioned. Instead, after Coxey’s brief and failed attempt at steel casting, the building became the home of the Mount Vernon branch of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. At its peak, the PPG factory was one of the area’s major employers, with entire families, including many Belgian immigrants, working to shape and cut glass together.

Proximity to readily available natural gas and fine sand made the factory the perfect place for glassmaking, and it was here that a new process of glassmaking, called the Pennvernon process, was invented. This process, in which glassmakers pulled ribbons of molten glass through rollers up to three stories high, dominated glassmaking globally from its invention in 1925 until the 1970s. In the 1950s, a new and more efficient process of glassmaking, called “Float Glass,” was invented and eventually replaced the Pennvernon process as the dominant way of making glass. Unable to adapt to this new glassmaking process, the factory was forced to close in 1976. What remains of the 89,250-square foot building today are a few crumbling walls and three elevator shafts, but the legacy of the industry it represents is alive and well in Ariel-Foundation Park.

Still the tallest architectural structure in Knox County, the smokestack is a centerpiece among the factory ruins that pay tribute to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company’s workers and their families. The 280-foot smokestack once expelled flue gases from the glassmaking facility. It was constructed by way of the slip form method, a continuous pouring of concrete that resulted in a smooth, uninterrupted surface. Lloyd Hull, a 31-year employee of PPG who worked mainly in the Carpenter Shop, recounted stories of pranks and bets between workers in the shop. One incident, in particular, involved the smokestack and a ten dollar bet between two co-workers to climb it. According to Hull, the man managed to successfully climb up the smokestack without any protective gear, but whether he ever received the $10 he was promised has been lost to history.

Although the park and its history as a glassmaking factory is significant, we have to wonder why its founders believed Mount Vernon to be uniquely important. In 1868, Peter Neff supervised the drilling of many natural gas wells near the county line of Coshocton and Knox, where the Kokosing and Mohican Rivers converge.  Gas companies soon flocked to the area, hoping to develop this abundance of natural gas. Emitting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than traditional fuels such as coal and wood, natural gas served also as a cheap and consistent fuel for many activities, including the energy-intensive manufacture of glass. In addition to this plentiful resource, Knox County hosted an abundance of silica sand, an important component in glassmaking. Different from river sand found near the Kokosing, silica sand is harvested from local sandstone and contains fewer impurities, creating fewer defects in the glassmaking process.

When the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (PPG) opened a factory in Mount Vernon in 1907, glassmaking was considered a highly dangerous occupation that required a certain set of skills believed to be a man’s work. As in most other industries at the time, there were no women working at the factory until World War II. In 1940, as men went off to war, industrial companies needed to temporarily replace their workers, calling on women to take their place. Considered a prestigious occupation in the community, the women of Mount Vernon hired by PPG were granted one of the higher-paying jobs in town.