As we continue to look at Beaver County Memories, we turn our attention to “industrial strength” memories.  This segment is part of a special series showcasing the manufacturing sector. Beaver County Memories brought to you by St. Barnabas.

Beaver County is well known for making steel.  Behemoth mills bearing the names of Jones and Laughlin, Crucible and Babcock and Wilcox became legendary for their contributions to the local economy as well as keeping the world supplied with top quality products, as only Beaver County workers could produce. But there were other things that were made in Beaver County.  Everything from fine china to chocolates, to bricks to cork and many other products were created by local residents through the years.

If you go to almost any antique shop in the area, or search online for collectible glassware, one name that continues to be highly sought after is H.C. Fry.  Fry glassware and oven ware, as it was called, was made in Rochester and became very popular in the early nineteenth century. The company was founded by Henry Clay Fry in 1901.  This wasn’t Fry’s first venture into the glassmaking business. Prior to churning out highly prized art deco dinner and tea sets, he founded and ran the Rochester Tumbler Company.  Fry’s claim to success was inventing the equipment and developing a process that allowed decorative glassware to be mass produced by machinery, instead of being hand blown, a change that was  revolutionary at the time.

In its top producing days of the 1920’s, H.C. Fry employed around one thousand workers. One of the more popular product lines developed was a line of cookware that could be used in the oven to bake the entrée, and then set on the table to serve the item.  Back in the day, that was a new concept.  Putting a piece of beautiful glassware into a hot oven was something that had never been done before.  H.C. Fry Blended beautiful design along with material and manufacturing innovation to create very popular bakeware. The signature look of H.C. Fry glass was a somewhat opaque, translucent glass that was sometimes tinted with green or blue color.

Henry Clay Fry passed in 1929, and just a few years later, the company he founded closed its doors, but the legacy he created lives on.  Avid groups and entire clubs have been formed over the years by people who collect Fry Glass. Even today, Fry Glassware is a very popular and recognizable  item that is representative of 1920’s antique glassware nationwide.

This “industrial strength” Beaver County memory has been presented by St. Barnabas. Archived transcripts of this and other Beaver County Memories can be found at Beaver County Radio dot com. Tune in everyday for another Beaver County Memory on WBVP, WMBA, 99.3 F.M., and online through google play and iTunes apps, and Alexa smart devices.