Kristin Qualls talks about WheatonArts’ large mold collection and its connection to Wheaton Industries. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 02:30.

Kristin Qualls: We do have a large number of molds because of our connection to Wheaton Glass Industry, the Wheaton Industries who had molds, so they had revived—was it the Wheatonware line that they revived the old molds from, like Kemple [Kemple Glass Company]? 

Dianne Wood: Yes. 

KQ: Yeah. So a lot of the molds we have came from—they’re made in the McKee Glass Factory in Jeanette, Pennsylvania around the turn of the last century, 1915, 1920s. Then they were sold to Kemple Glass in Ohio, then they were sold to Wheaton Industries, I think it was at that time, who then revived this—again, the sort of historic idea to revive some of these old patterns. And then when the Wheaton Factory was sold off, the story is that the day that the workers found out they’re going to change the locks and so no one who had worked there was going to be allowed back in, they were going to sell everything. And of course, this is an overseas conglomerate who doesn’t necessarily have an interest in glass, certainly not an interest in American glass history. So they snuck in and stole—put on their truck beds, and they’re all their pickup trucks all the molds they could find and that they could carry, and get out of there before they changed the locks, and then brought ‘em and dumped him here just to save them. I mean just to save them, the whole point was preservation. So that’s how we came by this large amount of molds plus other glass factories in their—Skip Woods, for example, donated a lot of molds to us, so we do have some molds from that. So we do have a lot of molds, which gives us the opportunity to have them be used so that they—again that idea of they serve as inspiration for artists coming through now, they serve as new tools, unique tools that they might not be able to find and other glass studios that they can experiment with and use while they’re here; again, you’re just connecting it back. You can find the piece maybe that was originally commercially sold—

Catherine Whalen: Mm-hmm.

KQ: —in the 1900s in our collection and then get a new piece that they’re making from the same mold. So it for me again, it’s that idea of it’s not necessarily a linear history. But these molds might have been used very much in 1920 and then all of a sudden today, someone’s re-engaging with them on a different level and bringing a modern sensibility to it and an artistic sensibility to it. So we do have, again, a number of them that are in use and a few in the collections that they’re preserved and Rembrandt rule and all that good stuff. But to let them continue to be muses for today’s glass artists and into the future, I think is, again, an important way of keeping—preserving the history and keeping it alive by allowing it to change and morph and become relevant to today.