Kristin Qualls discusses glass factories in South Jersey and the Clevenger Brothers. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:26.

Kristin Qualls (KQ):  Right, that factory connection, and so down here in South Jersey—and again, I think it was more insular. So that’s why it’s not really part of the broader story. But these guys that had been working at all of these hand—when they still made stuff by hand and then as we went automated, and Wheaton Glass Factory went automated in 1930, I want to say, early thirties. They were pretty late, actually, in comparison—Whithall Tatum [Whithall Tatum Company, Millville, New Jersey] went in 1915, I think. So you had this group of workers who had the skill and my sense is from reading about the Clevengers [Clevenger Brothers Glassworks] and stuff like they knew they had a sense of not wanting to lose this. So they would start their own backyard shops because they had the knowledge because they had worked in a factory or they could call the guy who made the furnace and just be like, ‘Hey, can you make me a little furnace?’ and then they would do stuff like collect Coke bottles until they had enough, and they’d all pool together their money and go get some gas and then melt these Coke bottles in this furnace and then stay up for 48 hours until the melt was gone, and just make things. And so the Clevenger brothers are one I bring up—and they were up in Clayton, which is just north of us, who ran a studio for a long time: twenties until the nineties.

Dianne Wood: ’96 I believe. I could be wrong. 

KQ: Yeah. And a lot of that was preserving that South Jersey tradition—making the lily pad pitchers. And in the collectors’ world there was frustration because it felt like you’re trying to mimic historic glass and trick the collectors, and that was never what the Clevengers meant. That might have been what some unscrupulous dealers were trying to do, but the Clevengers never tried to pass anything off as actual Colonial—and they were trying to, again, preserve these—and they did make some unique stuff that was a modern—or at the time contemporary—design for the time. But they also, again, mimic Pitkin flasks and lily pad pitchers and that sort of stuff that represented these historic designs that they knew about and were seeing go away because you need machinists and not glassblowers to run the automatic machines. And so these smaller studios that existed all around here with these old factory guys, I think our connection between keeping that hand skill alive before the1962 [Harvey] Littleton/[Dominick] Labino furnace that was able to go in fine arts studios to then switch that skill from the factory infrastructure to art school/art studio infrastructure. And so down here, I feel like our studio kind of represents that too, cause the original guys we had did come from those backyard studios or from the local companies, and they were interacting with the fellows that were coming in, the artists that were coming in. And even Hank [Adams]—who ran the Studio for 15 years—he had worked at Blenko [Blenko Glass Company, Milton, West Virginia] So while he had an art background he had also had an American production background. So I think there is something there about that, again, that just that, ‘Who’s keeping that hand skill alive?’ and the knowledge of those patterns and specific techniques that might have been used in the American factories particularly down here as opposed to the Italian tradition, which obviously is very strong much older than the American tradition, and definitely influenced the studio glass movement. And whereas that sort of balance about the interest in Murano and that Italian technique, balanced with preserving some of these less glamorous factory-based American traditions, that happened, that certainly don’t have as nice names as some of the Italian.