The story of the Glass House reads like fiction 146
GUILDERLAND Glass Works, the name of a proposed $100 million development in town, was suggested by Alice Begley, Guilderlands historian. The name is derived from one Guilderlands oldest industries: glass-making.
In a series of articles published in The Enterprise decades ago, former town historian and Enterprise contributor, the late Arthur B. Gregg, wrote about the Glass House, which was Guilderlands famous glass-making factory. In 1975, Greggs articles were assembled into a book called Old Helledergh: Scenes from Early Guilderland.
The factory, called the Albany Glass Works, was located along the banks of the Hungerkill, nearby present-day Route 20, a road historically known as the Great Western Turnpike.
"The story of the Glass House reads like fiction. Its very existence might even be challenged but for the few documentary references and the occasional unearthing by the plough of irregular lumps of blue and amber glass," Gregg wrote.
The main source of information regarding the Glass House, according to Gregg, is Joel Munsells Annals of Albany. Munsell describes the Albany Glass Works, most likely founded in 1785, as being located at Dowesburgh, an earlier name for the town, 10 miles west of Albany in what is now present-day Guilderland.
There are several discrepancies on the distance of the factory from Albany, said Gregg, because of the ever-changing city line. A man from Amsterdam, Holland, named John DeNeufville invested "his former wealth in hopes of retrieving his fortune," into the land for the glass-making factory.
"One naturally wonders why they chose for their project a location then almost a wilderness," wrote Gregg. "It was two miles distant from the highway connecting Albany and Schenectady. The Great Western Turnpike would not be built for another fourteen years. There were, however, quantities of sand, there was water power from the Hungerkill, there was plenty of wood for the furnaces, and"considerable potash, used in glass making, was manufactured in the localty."
A letter that DeNeufville wrote on Dec. 9, 1787 to Colonel Clement Dibble of Philadelphia, is currently in the New York State Library, and it stated that "the glass house comes very well, that they were able to sell their glass at retail equal to the British although it was yet objected to, on the account of its local character; that of course during the winter months exports to New York must be discontinued, while navigation on the Hudson was closed."
Gregg wrote that the year following that letter, in 1788, DeNeufville was visited by Elkanah Watson, a man with whom he had corresponded. Watson wrote he "found him in solitary seclusion living in a miserable log cabin furnished with a single deal table and two common arm chairs, destitute of the ordinary comforts of life."
In January of that year, the factory’s proprietors, Leonard De Neufvill, Jan Heefke and Ferdinand Walfahrt, "appealed to the patriotism of the State of New York to sustain their establishment. They said the state was annually drained of 30,000 pounds for this necessary article which they could manufacture of any size superior to the English glass. Their petition failed," wrote Gregg.
It was also that year that a grand celebration took place in Albany honoring the adoption the Federal Constitution for the newly-formed nation. In the parade were glass-makers dressed in green and they carried various tools such as globes and bottles, and a number of them were no doubt from the Glass House on the Hungerkill, according to Gregg.
Again in 1790, the proprietors petitioned the state legislature, and were granted 1,500 pounds on March 3, to ensure the continuation of the Glass House.
Going on to be a very successful industry, the factory, by 1813, had grown to an output of 500,000 feet of window glass per year. The village, called Hamilton at the time, contained 565 houses occupied by laborers employed at the Albany Glass Works, wrote Gregg. United States Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and General Phillip Schuyler both held large financial interest in the glass-making factory.
"As to its flasks or bottles, we know that one lone specimen is on exhibit in the State Museum at Albany. It might be described aqua-marine in color, half pint capacity, and bears the words in one surface, ‘Albany Glass Works, N.Y.,’" wrote Gregg. "On the reverse is what is said to be either Washington or Hamilton in uniform. A duplicate of this flask is to be found in the Municipal Museum at Rochester."
