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Sandwich Glass: A Technical Book for Collectors

Chapter 21: VICTORIAN ANIMALS
By Lenore Wheeler Williams
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About This Book

A practical handbook for collectors that surveys the development, production, and varieties of early American pressed flint glass made in New England factories. It combines a history of local glassmakers and works with technical explanations of materials, molds, pressing methods, and the distinctions between early hand-blown and later pressed commercial wares. The author catalogs representative forms such as cup plates, salts, candlesticks, lamps, and flatware, describes colors, molds, and identifying marks, and cautions against later mass-produced imitations. Numbered illustrations and a collector’s data section support identification and recordkeeping for the serious student of early American glass.

VICTORIAN ANIMALS

For the West Mustard Company about 1870 the Sandwich works made a number of designs consisting of chickens and other animals on nests of semi opaque white glass. Many of these had glass eyes and the less common ones found to-day are in colors, a remarkable blue predominating. These were filled with their products, labeled with a red and orange label and sold to the public destined later to become useful receptacles. Many collectors of these objects confuse the marbled glass which comes in mauve and white and ocre and white in many designs similar to the above with the Sandwich of this late period. This marbled glass in Whieldon effects was made at Phoenixville, Pa., and may be put in the same class as the advertising of the West Mustard Co. During this last period of the Sandwich Glass Works their products became cheapened to meet the demand of commercial advertising and an endless number of cheap glass premiums were sent out to all parts of the country in the era just preceding the soap wrapper and the patent medicine man.

An interesting bit of information in regard to the opalescent edges often found on pieces of Victorian glass is that this opalescence was produced by re-heating the edges to a dull red heat after it was molded.

The pattern for the opaque glass chickens was inspired by the early Staffordshire hens. This has led many to believe that the former were made in England but they are decidedly a late Sandwich product made of the same composition as many of the lamps and candlesticks. The author has found nests bearing the original orange and red labels of the West Mustard Company.

  • 1. Opaque white chickens large and small.
  • 2. Opaque all blue chickens large and small.
  • 3. Opaque blue and white roosters.
  • 4. Pair opaque dark purple chickens.
  • 5. Opaque white owl quite opalescent at edges.
  • 6. Opaque blue and white cats.
  • 7. Opaque blue and white dogs.
  • 8. Opaque white squirrel.
  • 9. Opaque white rabbit.
  • 10. Opaque white duck.
  • 11. Baskets in blue and white.
  • 12. Chickens in clear white, transparent blue and amber glass—rare.

In this group are steamboats, sleighs, Uncle Sam, and various political objects, all of which are uninteresting and not worthy of collection. Little glass bears were made for a concern promoting bear ointment. Heads of these jars have been dug up at the Sandwich works. Complete ones are hard to find.