When Pittsburgh earned its most famous nickname — the “Steel City” — another industry had already shaped its riverfronts, its economy, and its reputation: glass. For well over a century Pittsburgh was the center of American glassmaking, producing everything from window panes and bottles to cut crystal and the plate glass that went into the storefronts of growing American cities.
This is how that industry started on the south bank of the Monongahela, why it grew, and what survives of it.
Why Pittsburgh Became a Glassmaking Center
Glass is made by melting sand with fluxes in a furnace, so the early requirements were sand, limestone, plentiful fuel, and a way to ship a fragile product. Pittsburgh had all of these. Historians of the South Side point to the region’s sand and limestone deposits and its plentiful coal, and the rivers carried bottles and window glass down the Ohio to settlers and river towns. The founders of the first glassworks chose a site on the south side of the Monongahela, a favorable location for shipping products down the Ohio.
The city’s growing industries — iron, coal, oil, and later steel — created steady demand for bottles, lamp chimneys, and window glass, and the railroads later widened the market. See Pittsburgh’s coal mining boom and the 19th-century oil boom for the industries that shared those riverbanks.
The First Glasshouses, 1797–1850s
Pittsburgh’s first glass factory was started in 1797 by James O’Hara and Isaac Craig on the south side of the Monongahela River, across from the Point. It made bottles and window glass and kept operating into the 1880s. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission placed a marker for the Pittsburgh Glass Works in 1997 on West Carson Street, near the lower station of the Duquesne Incline (see Pittsburgh’s inclines). The Heinz History Center holds the O’Hara Glass Works minute books for 1851–1853, which show the company was still organizing itself as a stock company in the middle of the century.
The third glasshouse in Pittsburgh was the one that made the city’s reputation for fine tableware. Benjamin Bakewell took over a works in 1808 that became Bakewell, Pears & Co. and, later, Bakewell, Page & Bakewells. It is regarded as the first successful flint-glass (lead crystal) factory in the United States. The firm began on the riverbank near the foot of Grant Street and Water Street, burned in the Great Fire of 1845, was rebuilt in the same place, and moved to the South Side in 1854. In 1825, after Benjamin Page joined the firm, the company received a patent for a method of making pressed glass — a technique that later let factories turn out decorative tableware cheaply enough for ordinary households.
By 1837 nine glasshouses stood on the South Side, and firms such as Adams and Ripley became known for their flint-glass tableware. The South Side remained the heart of Pittsburgh glassmaking through the nineteenth century.
Typical products of this period:
- Bottles
- Window panes
- Lamps and lantern glass
- Pressed and cut tableware
Natural Gas Changes the Furnaces, 1880s
Coal fired Pittsburgh glass furnaces for most of the century. That changed in the early 1880s. Natural gas from the Murrysville field began reaching Pittsburgh’s South Side in 1882–83, and glassmakers adopted it quickly: by 1885, according to a contemporary account, the glasshouses in and around Pittsburgh that could get gas cheaply were using it for melting, blowing, and annealing. Glassmakers valued it because it produced a better-quality “metal” (molten glass) than coal, and the clay pots that held the melt lasted longer — two months more than the four normally expected with coal, according to historian accounts.
The gas supply also pulled the industry out of town. Pittsburgh’s taxes rose and land for expansion ran short on the crowded South Side, and railroad sidings were hard to get. James Chambers and H. Sellers McKee, who ran large window-glass operations in Pittsburgh, moved to Westmoreland County and helped create the town of Jeannette beginning in 1887. Other firms followed the gas fields.
PPG: Plate Glass at Creighton
Plate glass — poured and rolled, then ground and polished until smooth and free of distortion — was the product American manufacturers had struggled to make for decades; American cities were importing it from Europe. Captain John B. Ford, who had already failed at plate glass in Indiana, began building a plant at Creighton, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. When he ran short of money, John Pitcairn, a Pennsylvania Railroad division superintendent, invested. The Creighton plant began producing in 1883, and on August 17, 1883, the company took the name Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. It is recognized as the first commercially successful plate-glass factory in the United States.
Natural gas mattered here too: Ford helped develop gas supply in the Tarentum district to fuel the works. Ford later built another plant at Tarentum and then a whole company town, Ford City, incorporated as a borough in 1898. The company later diversified into paint and chemicals, and it is today PPG Industries.
Consolidation: The United States Glass Company
Smaller glass firms found it harder to survive on their own, and in 1891 a consolidation known as the United States Glass Company combined roughly 18 factories in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio (accounts vary between 17 and 18 depending on how later additions are counted). Its factories were identified by letters rather than names. Several were Pittsburgh houses, including Adams & Co., Bryce Brothers, George Duncan & Sons, and Ripley & Co., and the company’s main office began at South Ninth and Bingham Streets on the South Side. U.S. Glass moved its general offices to Tiffin, Ohio, in 1938.
Decline of the Glass City
Glassmaking left Pittsburgh in stages. First the factories moved to cheaper land and gas, as at Jeannette, Tarentum, and Ford City. Then the older firms were merged, and the Pittsburgh offices and plants shrank. In the later 20th century many Pittsburgh-area glass plants closed, while PPG, as noted above, diversified into paint and chemicals.
What Remains of the Glass City
- PPG Place, Downtown. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, the complex was dedicated on April 11, 1984. Its One PPG Place tower is glazed with 19,750 pieces of PPG reflective glass, and the six-building complex has 231 spires.
- The 1797 site marker. The state historical marker for the Pittsburgh Glass Works stands at 1197 West Carson Street, near the Duquesne Incline.
- Pittsburgh Glass Center. A nonprofit glass-art center at 5472 Penn Avenue in Friendship, opened in 2001, offering classes, a gallery, and glassblowing demonstrations. See its history page.
- Archives. Business records for O’Hara Glass Works and Bakewell, Page & Bakewells are held at the Heinz History Center and described through Historic Pittsburgh, including the O’Hara Glass Works minute books.
Conclusion: Before Steel, Glass
Before steel dominated the skyline, glass furnaces burned on the South Side and filled Pittsburgh’s windows, bottles, and tables. The industry’s move to gas and then to the gas fields shows how fuel and land shaped Pittsburgh’s industrial map long before the steel mills did. To follow that story further, explore Pittsburgh’s role in the oil boom of the 19th century, the rise and fall of the city’s iron furnaces, and the evolution of the Pittsburgh skyline.
