# The Mckearin chart number GXV-26 Whitney Glass works half pint flask.



## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Here is the listed as rare GXV-26 half pint light orange amber flask.What makes this bottle unique is that it is the first internal stopper designed for a bottle in the United States Patented on Jan 1st.1861.Samuel A. Whitney one of the two brothers who owned the glass works was credited with the design and patent of the stopper.This bottle is pretty rare and has a pint counterpart the GXV-27 flask.The pint flask has a double collared top but that is the only difference other then size.The internal screw threaded stopper reads PAT.JAN 1861.The base of the flask has the embossing WHITNEY GLASS WORKS.It is a nice orange amber in color with plenty of whittle from a cold mould. 

 Colonel Thomas Heston along with  Thomas Carpenter were the second owners of the colonial glass works started by the Stanger Family in the year 1775.Bathsheba Heston daughter of Colonel Heston married Capt Ebenezer Whitney.The Captain died young leaving Bathsheba a widow at a young age.She had three sons,Samuel Whitney was the most hands on of the three brothers, Thomas,Samuel and Eben who was named for his father Ebenezer Whitney.Young Thomas Whitney worked at the the newly founded Harmony glass works as an apprentice and learned the trade of glass making.He learned very quickly and had a keen business sense.Thomas Stanger who along with John Rink  founded the Harmony Glass works in 1816 400 yards south of the old colonial works the original Stanger family had founded.It had a more modern furnace and was sound financially. 

 Young Thomas Whitney worked his way up through the company and became the clerk of the company at just the age of 18 four years later at the age of twenty two in 1836 he purchased a one third interest in the Harmony glass works.Two years later in 1838 he owned the Glass works outright and renamed them them the Whitney Glass Works.Samuel A.Whitney went to work for his brother as a glass apprentice .His brother soon made him a partner in their 122 Walnut Street Philadelphia warehouse.This address is right next door to the famous Edmund G. Booz of the Booz Whiskey bottle at 120 Walnut Street. 

  Samuel left Glassboro to manage the warehouse,he did such a fine job as manager of the warehouse that Thomas Whitney president of the Whitney Glass works named him the Plant manger of his glass works back in Glassboro.Two years later he was named a Partner in the glass works and now he like his brother Thomas had worked his way up from glass worker to glass owner.One of Samuel's crowing achievements was the design of this internal threaded stopper.He was a hands on owner who new the glass trade better then any of his pears in the day. 

 This is a nice simple but rare flask that the Mckearins included in their flask charts because of it's uniqueness.One other note George  Mckearin mistakenly said the Whitney Glass works were started by Thomas Whitney and his two sons.This is incorrect as they were not only brothers but that the Whitney glass works only consisted of two of the brothers Thomas and Samuel as the youngest brother Eben started his own glass works 200 yards south of his brothers plant.Eben Whitney and his brother inlaw Woodward Warrick founded the Temperanceville Glassworks in 1842.It did well enough financially that he retired in just seven years.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 2


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 3


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 4                   In this picture you can see the internal threading.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 5


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 6   This picture shows the stopper upside down.There was a rubber like material described by Samuel Whitney in his Patent
 which can be found right here at the ( http://www.sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/whitney1861patent.pdf  ) located on or near the bottom tip.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 7  The top of the stopper embossed  PAT JAN 1861.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 8


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 9  The base of the flask embossed WHITNEY GLASS WORKS.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 10


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 11


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Number 12


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Last one,It looks as though the bottle is on fire on the inside does'nt it.The color of this flask matches exactly to a lot of the Booz bottles in my collection


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Here is the link corrected One of the brackets got in the way making the original link useless.

http://www.sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/whitney1861patent.pdf


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Woody, can you by editing this post the sixth page down get rid of the     )     character in the initial link http://www.sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/whitney1861patent.pdf  ) 
 this  )  character prevents the link from working. I have corrected it in the last post number 13 but most people will try the top one first.Thanks Steve


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## RedGinger (Sep 19, 2010)

Is that similar to the internal gravitational stopper?  Neat bottle and stopper, Steve and Lobes.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 19, 2010)

Hey Rich we have another thing in common now besides bromo's[],seriously nice bottle ,the Whitney glass works made some of the best looking amber bottles imaginable.This flask is rare though I am not kidding,you dont see to many of these half pint or pint versions ever.You have a quart version with an internal thread very nice.This bottle was one of the first I seeked out when I seriously started to collect again.When I was a kid I used to walk 6 miles to the grounds where the Whitney glass works were located.you could find so many bottles and so much glass digging an area the size of two football fields thats how large the works were.I gave away so many bottles I found to this nice old man that collected.He was handicapped and could not dig so it was the least I could do. Thanks for sharing your picture.


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## JOETHECROW (Sep 20, 2010)

Interesting history and glass,...real nice flasks guys! Steve,...I like your story of walking to the glass works,...What type of bottles were you finding there at that time?I'll bet some great stuff !....Laur,...the gravitational stopper looks more like this pic I borrowed from "Mr. Bottles" website,...a glass rod type stopper that pulled up into a rubber grommet in the neck of the bottle, rather than screwing into the neck....


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

Joe we found a lot of Whiskey bottles 1850 to 1880,lots of medicine slick's,pieces of Booz bottles never whole,bitters,Mason jars like you would not believe.The glass works were enormous in size 700x700 feet when they built an A&P super market on the properly in 1972 the construction alone was yielding a good 100 bottles a day on weekends for a month straight.And yes they were all hand blown.In the town I grew up in there was a man Mr Gant who in 1970 was 75 years old.He grew up in Glassboro two blocks from the Whitney works.His father worked at the works from 1880 at the age of fifteen until it closed as a gaffers helper and remembered seeing all these great bottles we desire now.Mr. Gant owned an antique store in town and we used to take him our bottles we dug and he would pay us a somewhat fair market value in the day.As our friendship grew he took myself and a digging buddy of mine to the Whitney Glass works which were only 6 miles away.Mr.Gant remembered the glass works quite well, for as in his youth they were still producing glass and did not close until 1912.We would literally fill his back compartment of his station wagon to the gills on a Saturday and Sunday just walking around the site.We kept the ones we really liked and the rest went to Mr. Gant.We were the only non construction related people allowed on the site because of Mr. Gants political and business connections in Glassboro at the time.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

The Quart whiskeys are a lot more common Rich,but still you have a nice match to go with your rare half pint.Your quart whiskey has the three piece mold dimple on the base.This puts your bottle in the 1860 to 1870 time frame.From 1870 to 1900 the Whitney glass works were the largest in the world.Here are a couple of pictures of the factory,a painting and a real photo from 1908.You can see the telephone poles in the real photo.The distance between them is 100 feet with 60 feet on each side of them.That is the main factory building which had 18 furnaces alone in it.There were at least five other buildings with multiple furnaces in them. If you look at the next picture drawing you can see the shear enormity of the works.The main building and its tallest tower are a small portion of the entire factory.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

I wonder what the air quality index was on this day.[8D]The main building is to the right in this drawing you are viewing it from it's left side.This place was big.This is why so much glass was found here Joe.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

As a comparison for size the Moore Brothers plant (the old Fislerville glass works1850 to 1860) were one fourth the size of the Whitney glass works.The current day Clevenger brothers works would have been just one building in the area I show which were occupied by the Moore Brothers factory in the 1860s through through 1906.This area now is dotted with residential homes in which is now Clayton New Jeresy.The Clevenger brothers building which is still standing and is a marked historic site now protecting it from demo,is maybe 60 x 40 in total size.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

Well I have to get back to work. See you all later.


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

Ok OK,.......  One more post and then I have to get back to work.If these little works with only three to four gaffers could produce as much glass as they did between 1930 and 1970(WAY TO MUCH)!!! IMAGINE how much a factory of Whitneys size could produce in a similar 40 year period.


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## RED Matthews (Sep 20, 2010)

Again Steve, thanks for sharing all this related information.  I can't help wondering if you are thinking of putting all this priceless information in a book, on "SOUTH JERSEY GLASS".   I sure enjoy reading your coverages of valuable information.  RED M.


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## RED Matthews (Sep 20, 2010)

Steve; You didn't identify this little glasshouse.  Please do.  RED Matthews


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 20, 2010)

My bad Red, that is the Clevengers factory which is still standing today.


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## JOETHECROW (Sep 20, 2010)

Really cool Steve,...Thanks for taking the time to post the information, as well as your story...Mr. Gant sounds like someone very interesting and it's really cool that he got you onto that construction site...A win/win situation for you guys and him..... Do you still have any of those bottles? I have quite a few of the bottles that I dug years back, and I they become more meaningful as I get older....


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 21, 2010)

Joe we pulled so much slag,broken almost whole and whole bottles we couldnt hall them all home.We were hiding nice whiskey bottles in the dirt piles and marking them with an obvious to us only marking so others could not find them until we returned.Yes I still have at least two fifty to three hundred common,not so common and rare bottles from the works.The privy diggers like yourself here at the forum would have gone totally bonkers,There was glass of every color sticking out of the ground.Imagine an area the size of a football field in size to dig and walk around looking for bottles in.If you were healthy enough to be able to bend over and dig just a tad they were yours for the taking.All of the keepers were 1850 to 1900.Surprisingly we found none of the machine mold ABM bottles that actually were the final nail in the coffin for the Whitney works.They made them for three years 1906 to 1909.


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## JOETHECROW (Sep 21, 2010)

[]Yes,..I could easily see myself 'going totally bonkers' in a place like that...[]


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## Steve/sewell (Sep 21, 2010)

Every single stitch of remains of these glassworks and the colonial glassworks just 900 feet North of the Whitney works are now gone forever.
 Glassboro has done a horrible job in their historic district salvaging,infact the opposite as they have just completed the eminent domaining of the last of the glass workers original homes to be razed so Rowan University can construct more live in Dorms at the campus even though enrollment is down because of the terrible economy and will probably never return to levels of 5 years ago.


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