WHO WERE THE FIRST GLASSMAKERS
IN ENGLISH AMERICA?
amestown, Virginia, has been called the
"birthplace" of America, because it is the site
of the first permanent English settlement in
America. While England organized this key set-
tlement and supplied most of its colonists, a
number of Continental Europeans also made
their contributions as artisans and specialists.
We know that among these specialists were sev-
eral Continental glassmakers, but their specific
country of origin is still in question. When
Captain John Smith, the governor of the first
permanent English colony, recorded the ar-
rival of glassmakers at Jamestown, Virginia, in
1608, he lumped them together with other
craftsmen from Germany and Poland.
Recently I visited the Colonial National His-
torical Park, which includes the site of
Jamestown. I wanted to see if I could discover
any clues to the identity of these important
American pioneers.
A leaflet in the Jamestown Visitors Center run
by the National Park Service urges guests to
"visit the GLASSHOUSE where craftsmen
demonstrate the art of 17th century glass-blow-
ing, one of Virginia's first industries, established
in 1608."¹ There is no mention of the nationality
of the glassmakers. A German translation of the
same leaflet is equally silent on this subject.
In his Generall Historie of Virginia, John Smith
stated that in October 1608 about seventy set-
tlers arrived, including "eight Dutchmen and
Poles."² He indicated that the men were hired
to make pitch, tar, glass, clapboard and soap
ashes.³ Elsewhere he identifies the "Dutch-
men" as Germans.4 The eight craftsmen in-
cluded three German carpenters, Adam, Franz
and Samuel, as well as some glassmakers.
Among the new arrivals were also several Pol-
ish makers of soap ashes and potashes, pitch,
and tar. Three of the Poles are known by name,
Robert, Molasco, and Matthew.
The glassmakers who came to Jamestown in
1608 were probably all of the same nationality
because it is unlikely that the Virginia Com-
pany of London, which organized the colony,
would have sent to Poland for one set of glass-
makers and to Germany for another. A single
language would have facilitated communica-
tion among the glassmakers as they went about
their difficult craft. In Europe a glasshouse was
run by a master and several helpers; it is proba-
ble that a particular master traveled to America
with his own helpers.
It is difficult to determine how many glass-
makers actually came to Jamestown. If three
Poles are to be counted among the eight crafts-
men who arrived in 1608, only two unnamed
glassmakers, a master and an assistant, remain
unaccounted for. Yet two men seem too few to
operate the three ovens and the kiln which
were excavated near Jamestown. J. C. Harring-
ton, the archeologist who excavated the ovens,
wrote, "The crew that actually made the glass
articles would probably have consisted of two
or, at the most, three experienced glass work-
ers with one or two helpers. In addition, there
would have been a number of other helpers, or
'boys,' who did the unskilled work or per-
formed more particular jobs under the super-
vision of the glass workers. There may have
been as many as five of these helpers. . . ."5 It is
worth noting in this regard that when the Eng-
lish made a second attempt to manufacture
glass at Jamestown in 1621, they brought over
six glassmakers plus their families, which pre-
sumably included apprentices.6
The American historian Conway Whittle
Sams resolves the difficulty by interpreting Cap-
tain Smith's phrase "eight Dutchmen and Poles"
to mean eight Dutchmen plus Poles.7 The Ja-
cobeans apparently had no expression equiva-
lent to the modern "plus"; they had to content
themselves with the word "and" to convey both
meanings. In speech it would, of course, have
been readily apparent which use of "and" was
meant; less so in written form. Sams' inter-
pretation would leave five glassmakers, a suf-
ficient number to have run the operation.
The craftsmen set to work presently to build
a glasshouse. Councilor William Strachey de-
scribed it as "a goodly house . .. with all offices
and furnaces thereto belonging." The
glasshouse included three furnaces: a fritting
furnace for preheating the glass ingredients; a
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J
First Glassmakers in English America
working furnace for melting the glass and for
keeping it at a working temperature; and an
annealing furnace for slowly cooling the fin-
ished pieces. There was also a kiln to fire pots
used in melting the glass. The glass house was
built on the mainland about a mile from James
Fort, which stood on a peninsula. The
glasshouse was convenient to the James River,
the beaches of which supplied the sand for
glassmaking. The foundations of the furnaces
and the kiln have been uncovered. An histori-
cal marker at the entrance to the enclosure
which protects the remains of the glassmaking
furnaces reads:
GLASSMAKING -1608
HERE ON GLASSHOUSE POINT THE JAMESTOWN
SETTLERS
, IN 1608, BUILT FURNACES, MADE
GLASS
, AND SHIPPED A "TRIAL" OF IT TO ENG-
LAND
. THIS MARKED THE BEGINNING OF OUR
AMERICAN GLASS MANUFACTURE
, ONE OF THE
NATION
'S FIRST "INDUSTRIAL" ENTERPRISES.
THE JAMESTOWN GLASSHOUSE FOUNDATION
,
INC
., IN COOPERATION WITH THE UNITED
STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
, HAS
MADE THIS EXHIBIT POSSIBLE
. IT INCLUDES THE
ORIGINAL FURNACE REMAINS AND A PERIOD
TYPE GLASSHOUSE
. FROM SUCH HUMBLE BEGIN-
NINGS AMERICA'S GREAT GLASS INDUSTRY HAS
GROWN
. IN RECOGNITION OF THIS GREAT
ACHIEVEMENT THIS PLAQUE IS PRESENTED
.
UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
A booklet on sale in the replica glasshouse,
which is under the jurisdiction of the National
Park Service, states:
The Dutchmen appear to have given trouble
from the first, and it is doubtful if they ever
contributed much to the glassmaking effort,
beyond possibly assisting in the initial construc-
tion of the glasshouse. We know that some of
them were carpenters, for they were sent to
Chief Powhatan's village to build houses for
the Indians. It appears more likely that the
Poles were the glassmakers, for Smith, in his ac-
count of the fight with an Indian near the
glasshouse, says that the Indian attempted to
flee upon 'perceiving two of the Poles.'8
The booklet claims that the Dutchmen (ac-
tually Germans) contributed little to the glass-
making because they were troublemakers.
However, the records show that of the Ger-
mans only the three carpenters allegedly gave
trouble to Captain Smith, who was in the habit
of finding fault with almost all of his associates.
It is certainly possible that J. C. Harrington, the
author of the booklet, draws unwarranted in-
ferences about all the Germans from the al-
leged deficiencies of some of them. Har-
rington surmises that the Poles were the
glassmakers because they came to Smith's help
"near the glasshouse." Yet Smith's account re-
veals that he was attacked by the chief of the
Paspahegh somewhere on the mile-long road
from the glasshouse to James Fort.9 The fact
that Poles came to Smith's assistance some-
where in the general vicinity of the glasshouse
does not seem sufficient reason for identifying
the Poles as the glassmakers.
Harrington is alone among historians in as-
suming that all the glassmakers were Poles.
The National Park Service as well as the Com-
monwealth of Virginia and the eminent British
archeologist-historian Ivor Noël Hume count
Germans among the glassmakers.10 The ques-
tion, then, is not whether some of the glass-
makers were German, but whether all the glass-
makers were German?
The American historian Philip L. Barbour
answers the question in the affirmative. He
writes:
. .. the postulation that the Poles were hired to
make glass is based on evidence that is flimsy
indeed. Here is all that is known about the mat-
ter: Captain Smith was "returning but from the
glasse-house alone" when he encountered the
Werowance of Paspahegh, who first attempted
to shoot Smith, but Smith grappled with him.
The latter, however, prevented Smith from
drawing his falchion, and the two fell into the
river. "Long they struggled in the water, from where
the king [chief] perceiving two of the Poles upon the
sandes, would have fled: but the President [Smith]
held him by the haire and throat til the Poles came
in." The two quoted passages which I have put
in italics are the sole surviving evidence that
the Poles were glass experts. Indeed, my re-
search into the history of glassmaking in
Poland tends to hint that the Poles were hired
for pitch and tar work, and the Germans for
the glass, despite the vagueness of John Smith's
account. There is no evidence that Poland had
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First Glassmakers in English America
a glass industry of any great consequence in
the days of Zygmund III (1587-1632)....11
In all the books available at the Library of
Congress on the general history of glassmak-
ing, there is no reference to Polish glassmak-
ing. The German glassmaking industry of the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries is, on the
other hand, described at length.12 The German
glass industry was not only much older than
the Polish one but far more extensive and so-
phisticated. Indeed, a "Glass Map of Europe"
depicting areas of glass production during the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries shows no
production in Poland while showing three
areas of concentration of German glass-
making, the Spessart, the Thuringian forest
and the Iser and Riesen mountain ranges.13
Ada Polak states in Glass: Its Makers and Its
Public, "Within the German-speaking areas,
the forest glassmaking regions ran from the
northern and central areas of Holstein and
Hanover, by way of Thuringia, Franconia and
Saxony to Bohemia and Silesia."14 The type of
glass produced at Jamestown in 1608-09 was
identified as green glass or Waldglas by J. C.
Harrington, the archeologist who described
the ruins of the glasshouse.15 "The name, for-
est glass (waldglas) which is generally given to
the common glass made at many places in Ger-
many in the Middle Ages is derived from the
use of potash in the form of beech or other
wood ash as an alkali...."16
To advance particular commercial ventures
in the New World, the English made some ef-
fort to bring over foreign specialists from coun-
tries noted for these commercial enterprises.
For example, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert set
out in 1583 to prospect for precious metals
under his patent from Queen Elizabeth, he
conveyed along the mineral specialist Master
Daniel the Saxon. During the Elizabethan era,
Germany led in metallurgy, and the English
mineral industry at that time was to a major ex-
tent created by German skill. Sir Walter
Raleigh likewise brought along a German-Jew-
ish mineral expert, Joachim Gans of Prague,
when he attempted a settlement in 1585. The
Virginia Company of London fetched German
mineral men to Jamestown as well as French
experts in viniculture. In their second attempt
to start a glass industry at Jamestown, the Eng-
lish in 1621 brought over Italian glassmakers,
who were even more skilled than the Germans,
because they could produce clear glass. At no
time do we see the English looking for practi-
tioners of a particular industry in a country
where that enterprise was not at a high level.
It seems highly probable that the Virginia
Company of London would have been more
inclined in 1608 to fetch glassmakers from a
country with sophisticated glassmaking tech-
niques, such as Germany, than from a country
with a relative paucity of glassmakers who were
comparatively less skilled. While Polish glass-
makers might have come cheaper, the Com-
pany could have been far more certain that
Germans would be able to produce glass in the
Virginia wilderness that was readily salable on
the English market.
The high skill of the Germans is evident
from the fact that they were welcome in other
countries. For example, in 1510, German glass-
makers worked in the Italian cities of Perugia,
Florence, Bologna and Arezzo.17 The early
glassmakers of Jutland, Denmark, were mainly
of German origin.18 Glassmaking was intro-
duced into Sweden by German glassmakers.19
In 1569, a London merchant named Anthony
Becku tried unsuccessfully to bring German
glassmakers to England.20 While the German
industry was relatively highly developed at the
end of the sixteenth century, Poland had com-
paratively little industry. Imports to England
from Poland consisted mainly of "raw materials
and semi-manufactures."21
Although little glass was exported from
Poland to England,22 Poland did export large
quantities of pitch, tar and soap ashes.23 For
this reason, one of the men who planned the
English colony urged that "Men skilfull in
burning of Sope ashes, and in making of Pitch,
and Tarre, and Rozen" should be brought to
Virginia "out of Prussia and Poland, which are
thence to be had for small wages, being there
in the manner of slaves."24 What was called
Prussia then was part of Poland and would be
known later as East Prussia. This advice was in-
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First Glassmakers in English America
deed followed, as the records of the Virginia
Company show, and Poles were brought to
Jamestown in 1608 to make soap ashes as well
as pitch and tar.
Eleanor S. Godfrey believes that the
Jamestown glasshouse was established to sup-
ply window glass for the London market:
At a time when the scarcity of window glass in
London was most acute, there was a daring at-
tempt to supply the market from a new source.
London merchants in the newly formed Vir-
ginia Company decided to establish a
glasshouse in the struggling settlement at
Jamestown Virginia....25
In the year 1567 window glass was imported
into England from Normandy, Lorraine, and
Hesse.26 The province of Hesse included the
Spessart Mountains, which were a center of
German glassmaking as indicated by Polack
and other writers.27 Since Hesse was the Ger-
man glassmaking region nearest to England
and easily accessible via the Rhine, it could
very well have been the place of origin of the
glassmakers at Jamestown. We do know that
glassmakers from Hesse were inclined to mi-
grate. There is documentation of a Hessian
glassmaker in the Duchy of Holstein in 1574
and in Sweden in 1591; later we find Hessian
names appearing again and again in Dessau,
Brandenburg and even in Bohemia.28
The glassmakers at Jamestown went to work
so rapidly after their arrival in October 1608
that samples of their product were sent to Eng-
land in December and arrived there 23 Jan-
uary 1609. More glass was produced in the
spring of 1609, but there is no record of glass
production after the "Starving Time" during
the winter of 1609-1610, when the population
shrank from 500 to about sixty.
The production of pitch and tar, as well as of
potashes and soap ashes apparently continued,
because Poles are referred to as makers of
these products as late as 1619 and 1620. In
1619, the Company ordered that "some young
men" shall be apprenticed to "the Polonians
resident in Virginia," so that "their skill in mak-
ing pitch and tar and soapashes shall not die
with them. . . ."29 While I found no document
which establishes conclusively that all the glass-
makers at Jamestown were German, there is
every likelihood that this was the case. I believe
that the glassmakers at Jamestown were the
forerunners of those later German glassmak-
ers, such as Kaspar Wistar, Heinrich Wilhelm
Stiegel and Johann Friederich Amelung who
established the first successful glass factories in
this country.30
. Gary C. Grassl
Washington, B.C.
1
The Jamestown Story (Colonial National Historical Park,
National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior),
no date.
2
John Smith, The Generall Histarie of Virginia, New-Eng-
land, and the Summer Isles with the names of the Adventurers,
Planters, and Governours from their first beginning An: 1584 to
the present 1624 (London: Michael Sparkes, 1624), Libro 3,
73.
3
Smith stated, "As for the hyring of the Poles and
Dutch-men, to make Pitch, Tar, Glasse, Milles, and Sope
ashes when the Country is replenished with people, and
necessaries, would have done well, but to send them and
seauentie more without victualls to worke, was not so well
aduised nor considered of, as it should have beene" (His-
torie, 66).
4
Smith identified the "Dutchmen" as Germans when he
stated, "to send into Germany or Poleand for glassemen &
the rest" while the colony was not yet on its feet was not a
good idea (Historie, 72).
5
J. C. Harrington, A Tryal of Glasse: The Story of Glassmak-
ing at Jamestown. (Richmond, VA: Eastern National Park &
Monument Association, 1972), 40.
6
Harrington, 11.
7
Conway Whittle Sams, The Conquest of Virginia: The Sec-
ond Attempt (Norfolk, VA: Keyser-Doherty Printing Co.,
1929), 628.
8
Harrington, 10.
9
Smith says that upon "returning from the
Glasse-house alone . . . he incountered the King of Paspa-
hegh, a most strong stout Salvage ..." (Historie, 84).
10
At the Jamestown Settlement Museum (Jamestown
Gallery, Jamestown Economic Experiments) run by the
Commonwealth of Virginia, visitors may read, "Because
Virginia possessed the natural ingredients for glass.sand,
wood ashes, and lime.the [Virginia] Company [of Lon-
don] hoped that glass production in Virginia would help
meet the growing demand for the commodity in England.
In 1608, the Company sent Polish and German craftsmen
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NOTES
First Glassmakers in English America
to Jamestown to operate a glasshouse."
At the entrance to the enclosure protecting the furnace
ruins, an introductory tape by the National Park Service
informs the visitor that "Polish and German glassmakers"
built the glassmaking furnaces.
Noel Hume refers to "Glassmakers, German" in the
index to his book The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James
Towne: An Archeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1994). On page 216, he writes, "The [glass-
making] operation was manned by some of the Dutchmen
(really Germans.i.e., Deutschmänner) and Poles brought
over with the Second Supply, and by 1610 they had set up
what was then described as a 'goodlie howse .. . with all of-
fices and furnaces thereto belonging" and situated 'a little
without the Island where James towne standes.'"
11
"The Identity of the First Poles in America" in William
& Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XXI (January 1964), 90.
12
For example, in A History of Technology: Volume III From
the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution c. 1500 - c. 1750
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) there is extensive de-
scription of German glassmaking but not a word on Polish.
The Encyclopedia Americana (International Edition, Dan-
bury, Conn.: Grolier, 1994), 798, discusses sixteenth-cen-
tury glassmaking in various German states under "Glass
and Glassware" but is silent on Poland. Historical German
glassmaking techniques are discussed in The New Ency-
clopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, Vol. 5, "Glass," 296-297,
but again there is no mention of Poland.
The author asked Dr. Gerhard E. Sollbach, member of
the faculty of the Historical Institute of the University of
Dortmund, to help with identification of the glassmakers
at Jamestown. He, in turn, asked a Polish colleague,who
"when he went to Poland for a research visit (University of
Oppeln) this summer, checked the literature (so far as his
time allowed him to do it) for any information on glass-
making in Poland around 1600.but without any success.
As he told me, this seems to have been no subject for Pol-
ish historians" (personal communication of 15 November
1995).
13
Ada Polak, Glass: Its Makers and Its Public (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).
14
Polak, 44-45.
15
Harrington, 31-33.
16
Reginald G. Haggar, Glass and Glassmakers (New York:
Roy Publishers, 1961), 28.
17
Otto Stöber, Wundersames Glas (Linz: Landverlag,
1947), 32.
18
Polak, 40.
19
Stöber, 41.
20
Eleanor S. Godfrey, The Development of English Glass-
making, 1560-1640 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975), 25.
21
Henryk Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan
Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 217.
22
"The surviving port books reveal only small quantities
of glass exported from Poland to England. In 1588 the
merchant John Knapp imported one barrel of glass from
Königsberg, and in 1599 English merchants collected
twenty cases of glass from Elbing" [Königsberg and Elbing
were Polish ports.] (Zins, 273).
23
"In 1588 Baltic countries met 41 per cent of London's
requirements in pitch and tar . . . almost the whole of Eng-
land's imports of Baltic pitch and tar came from Danzig
and Elbing. . . ." [Danzig, like Elbing, was a Polish port.]
(Zins, 246).
24
Richard Hakluyt (lawyer), "Inducements to the liking
of the voyage intended towards Virginia" written in 1585
and first published as an appendix to John Brereton's A
Brief and true Relation . . . London, 1602.
25
Godfrey, 58.
26
Godfrey, 13, estimates that about 400 cases of window
glass were imported in 1567 from Normandy, Lorraine and
Hesse.
England imported not only window glass from Germany
but also chemical glass. English port records show that in
1587-1588, 100 glass stills were imported from Dortmund
and 200 "stilling glasses" from Emden. A 1621 petition
against the English glass monopolist Sir Robert Mansell
claimed that "chimicall glasses, as retorte heades and bod-
ies, boulte heades and other like used for extractions distil-
lacion and other Chimicall and Physical uses" had been
imported from Germany before James I granted Mansell
his monopoly and that they were better and cheaper [Ivor
Noel Hume, First and Lost: In Search of America's First English
Settlement (Manteo, NC: National Park Service, Fort
Raleigh National Historic Site, 1995), 120-121.]
27
Robert Schmidt, Das Glas (Berlin: Verlag Georg
Reimer, 1912), 131-133, writes that in the sixteenth-cen-
tury Hesse along with its adjoining forest regions was one
of the two top glass-producing regions of Germany. As
early as 1406 all glassmakers around the Spessart Moun-
tains organized themselves into a union. In 1557, more
than 200 glassmakers gathered at the annual session of the
court in the town of Almerode in Hesse. The glass houses
in Hesse appear to have conducted a significant export es-
pecially along the Rhine.
28
Schmidt, 133.
29
The records of the Virginia Company of 21 July 1619
state:
Upon some dispute of the Polonians resident in Vir-
ginia, it was now agreed (notwithstanding any former
order to the contrary) that they shall be enfran-
chised, and made as free as any inhabitant there
whatsoever: and because their skill in making pitch
and tar and soapashes shall not die with them, it is
agreed that some young men shall be put unto them
to learn their skill and knowledge therein for the
benefit of the country hereafter [Susan Myra Kings-
bury, Records of the Virginia Company of London (Wash-
ington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1935), Vol. I, 251].
Poles are also referred to as makers of pitch and tar as
well as soap ashes and potashes under entries of 17 May
1620 and 22 June 1620.
30
Jane Shadel Spillman, Glassmaking: America's First In-
dustry. (Corning, NY: The Corning Museum of Glass,
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First Glassmakers in English America
1976), 8, states: "The first successful glass manufactory in
the colonies was that of Caspar Wistar, a Philadelphia
brass-button manufacturer, who had immigrated from Ger-
many. He imported German glassblowers in 1739 to staff
the factory he established in southern New Jersey. . . . The
second successful entrepreneur in glass was also a German.
Henry William Stiegel built three glasshouses at Elizabeth
Furnace and Manheim, Pennsylvania, between 1763 and
1774, and attempted to produce fine tableware as well as
bottles and window glass." A few pages later Spillman con-
tinues: 'John Frederick Amelung arrived in the new re-
public in 1784 with men and equipment to develop a large
glass factory complex for the manufacture of all types of
glass. He came from a glassmaking family in Germany and
was backed by a group of merchants in Bremen.
Amelung's factory was established in Maryland, at a site
[near Frederick] he named New Bremen and was, for a
time, successful. He produced the most sophisticated glass
which had been made in America up to that time. . ."
(Spillman, 11).
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