Description: Blown, tall aqua-blue glass pitcher with a small handle, made by the Franklin Glass Factory Co. site in Warwick, Massachusetts, a small town about 22 mi. northeast of Deerfield. The collector, Julia D. Sophronia Snow, bought this piece from an old Northfield, Mass. (next to Warwick) family descendent, H. A. M. Briggs. The Franklin glasshouse was one many industries that began after Thomas Jefferson's Embargo of 1807-1809, which blocked British goods from entering America and spurred local manufacture of glass, ceramics, and textiles, and then propered during the War of 1812. In 1812, Dr. Ebenezer Hall of Warwick persuaded a group of the town's prosperous citizens (William Cobb, Jacob Rich, Benjamin Tuel, and Samuel Fay) to join him in financing the Franklin Glass Factory Company to produce glass hollowwares and window glass. Production began in 1813, but there were a number of problems, including major furnace repairs and staffing. However, the glasshouse factory found several markets for its products from Greenfield, Mass. to Hartford, Conn. With the conclusion of the War of 1812 with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, British imports flooded the market with far cheaper goods, and the factory closed in 1816; Kenneth Wilson estimates that at least half of the American glasshouses built between 1808-1815 failed within 5 yrs. of the 1814 peace treaty.
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