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Ball Brothers Foreclosure and Antitrust Case

confidence: high volatility: cold verified: 2026-07-26fresh

How Ball Brothers took Three Rivers Glass, told through three procedural accounts: Tips' own story (a San Antonio attorney hired to secure RFC-loan priority secretly served Ball, which bought the first-mortgage notes and foreclosed in Federal Court), Smith's 1989 history (same mechanism, transaction closed 1937), and the Bottle Research Group's 2019 chapter (bankruptcy proceedings from October 1932, a long receivership, and a November 27, 1936 auction Ball won at $80,000). The endgame converges on late November–December 1936. BRG's Hartford-Empire license evidence (Vatter 1955) — fruit-jar production outside license scope, price-cutting, Ball's repeated demand notices — independently corroborates the anticompetitive motive, and the 1947 Supreme Court order that Ball divest the Three Rivers holdings (sold September 1954) anchors the antitrust aftermath.

Charles R. Tips lost control of the Three Rivers Glass Company factory when, by his own detailed account, an attorney he paid to secure a Depression-era rescue loan instead delivered the company’s mortgage notes to competitor Ball Brothers Glass Company, which foreclosed. Tips says a subsequent federal antitrust prosecution later found Ball Brothers, Hartford Empire, and Owens-Illinois guilty of anticompetitive conduct in the glass-container industry — a conviction the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on appeal.

The RFC Loan and the “Crooked Attorney”

As the Depression deepened, Tips sought a $100,000 loan from the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), then headed by Jesse Jones — Michael David Smith’s 1989 book confirms Tips and Jones were personally acquainted, and that the RFC’s approval required two conditions: a federal engineering inspection confirming the plant could produce enough to repay the loan (Tips’ own 1973 marker-dedication speech recalls that “engineers from Pennsylvania went to Three Rivers with me, surveyed the factory, and made a completely favorable report”), and agreement from the holders of Three Rivers Glass’s existing first mortgage note — a lending firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma — to give the RFC’s new loan first priority.

The board retained San Antonio attorney William Church, who had prior business dealings with the Tulsa lender, and paid him $500 to travel and secure that agreement. Per Smith’s account, Church was — unknown to Tips and the board — already representing a second client: Ball Brothers Glass Company of Muncie, Indiana, then the largest commercial glass producer in the United States and a serious Three Rivers competitor. Rather than secure the RFC’s priority lien, Church passed along the company’s precarious financial position to Ball, who considered it well worth the price of the mortgage note to buy it and foreclose.

Tips himself named Church in his 1973 marker-dedication speech text (read in his absence at the ceremony), though with the relationship framed slightly differently — as the Tulsa firm’s own attorney rather than one the board retained: “The Tulsa firm had an Attorney named William Church representing them. I went to San Antonio to see Church… we would give him $500.00 to pay for his time and the cost of his trip… However, instead of getting the agreement for us, he got Ball Brothers Glass Company whom he had been dealing with to buy the notes from the bank and foreclose against us. I had mortgaged all of my land, my home and everything I had to save the Glass Factory and lost it all.”

In Tips’ own words (October 11, 1971 letter to Thelma Lindholm): “The glass trust found out about this and through a crooked attorney, Ball Brothers purchased these first mortgage notes and would not agree to the loan. They went into the Federal Court because the people that were working to put us out of business were from outside of the State. The Federal Court allowed them to foreclose on the first mortgage note and take over the factory.” Smith’s book, Tips’ 1971 letter, and Tips’ 1973 speech all give the same mechanism; no source names a specific individual at Ball Brothers who acted on the tip.

Tips’ May 18, 1973 letter to Lindholm gives essentially the same account with less detail, referring to “the unscrupulous things the big out of State factories did in putting us out of business and their planned closing down of the plant the year after they took it over from us and their indictment by the Federal Courts and their conviction for what they had done to put the Three Rivers Glass Company out of business.”

When the Takeover Happened

Multiple independent sources converge on December 1936 as the operational takeover date, even though the popular/summary account (reflected on the Three Rivers Glass Company website and the Texas Historical Marker text itself) simply says “sold in 1937”:

  • A December 10, 1936 Denison Press article (“Three Rivers Glass Factory ‘Reopens’ for the last time”) reports the plant resuming operations under new management, quoting “Chas. R. Tips, president of Tips Glass Sales corporation” — Kevin Mackey’s annotation on this clipping explains the changed title directly: “This is the re-opening under Ball Brothers after they had bought the outstanding mortgage through a crooked lawyer and forced the take over. That is why Charles R. Tips is no longer the ‘President of Three Rivers Glass Company,’ and instead, ‘President of Tips Glass Sales corporation.’”
  • Mackey separately cites minutes of an October 15, 2000 Midwest Antique Fruit Jar and Bottle Club presentation by Dick Cole, apparently drawing on Ball Brothers’ own production records: “The company fell on hard times and went into receivership in December, 1936. They were taken over by Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company which restarted production December 8, 1936.” Mackey adds that “All of the references in regards to the Ball Brothers times lines list the year to be 1936,” citing “Ball Brothers Glass Mfg. Co.” by Lockhart, Schriever, Serr, Lindsey, and Sears as one example.

The Bottle Research Group’s 2019 encyclopedia chapter (drawing on Dick Roller’s files and the American Glass Review factory yearbooks) supplies a third, procedurally distinct account with the most precise dates of any source compiled here: the firm “began bankruptcy proceedings in October of 1932 and was listed with ‘R.A. Ellerman, agent for receiver’ the following year” — a long process during which the plant kept producing soda bottles, milk bottles, packers’ ware, and fruit jars through 1936. On November 27, 1936, the Three Rivers property was auctioned, and Ball Brothers Corp. made the highest bid of $80,000, becoming the new owner of the factory, the patents (possibly those connected with the Mexican-built machines), and all other property.

The three procedural accounts, side by side:

  1. Tips/Smith: Ball, tipped off by attorney William Church, bought the Tulsa firm’s first-mortgage notes, refused the RFC priority agreement, and foreclosed through the Federal Court.
  2. Mackey/Cole: the company “went into receivership in December, 1936” and Ball took over, restarting production December 8, 1936.
  3. BRG/Roller: bankruptcy proceedings from October 1932, a receiver’s agent listed by 1933, and a November 27, 1936 auction won by Ball.

These are not necessarily contradictions. BRG’s long receivership (1932–36) ending in the November 27 auction dovetails almost perfectly with the December 8, 1936 production restart under Ball; Cole’s “went into receivership in December, 1936” is best read as compressing the receivership’s end into its final month. Tips’ foreclosure story and the auction may likewise describe the same endgame from different angles — Ball, holding the first-mortgage notes it had bought on Church’s tip, was both the party that blocked the RFC rescue and the natural winning bidder when the encumbered property was finally sold. What no account disputes is the outcome: by late November–December 1936, Ball owned everything. That said, the accounts have real tension too — Tips frames a Federal Court foreclosure on the mortgage note, BRG a bankruptcy receivership ending in auction, and neither source mentions the other’s mechanism — so the exact legal route remains an open question even as the date converges.

The formal legal transfer of the corporate property, per a Live Oak County Clerk deed record cited in Thelma Lindholm’s marker research (Book 71, page 507), came later: “Charles R. Tips sold the Three Rivers Glass Company, Inc. out to the Ball Glass Corporation and all track or parcel of land… Signed: March 31, 1938. Filed April 11, 1938.” Read together, the most consistent picture is an operational foreclosure/takeover in December 1936, with Tips continuing to run the separate sales side for a time, and the deed formally completing the corporate transfer in early 1938 as Ball wound the plant down.

This is not, however, fully resolved. Michael David Smith’s 1989 book — the most authoritative single secondary source in this wiki, and the book Kevin Mackey himself cites — states plainly that “In 1937, the Ball Brothers closed the transaction on the purchase of the Three Rivers Glass Company,” siding with the popular “1937” account rather than the more precise December 1936 date the newspaper clipping, the Dick Cole citation, and the deed-record sequence above point to — and which BRG’s November 27, 1936 auction date now strongly reinforces. Smith’s “1937” is most plausibly the year the transaction’s paperwork closed rather than the year Ball took the plant. See Three Rivers Glass Closure Timeline Dispute for the full discussion.

Ball’s Operation and the Factory’s End

Per Tips: “When Ball Brothers took over the Three Rivers Glass Factory, I had personally gotten enough contracts with purchasers of Glass Containers to run at full capacity at a profitable basis for the coming year. Ball Brothers operated the factory for one year to fill these contracts and then closed the factory down, their only purpose in taking over the factory had been to eliminate the competition from Three Rivers Glass Company.” This matches Mackey’s independent framing that Ball “got control of the company and finished the existing orders by the close of the year. In 1938 Ball dismantled the factory,” and Smith’s account that Ball “maintained operation of the plant throughout 1937 to honor the contracts the Three Rivers Glass Company had acquired,” completing the last obligations and beginning to dismantle the operation “in the last days of 1937” — consistent with the formal corporate deed following in early 1938. The Bottle Research Group (citing Roller 1997) independently confirms the fill-the-contracts year: Three Rivers “had so many outstanding contracts that the Balls continued to operate the plant throughout 1937,” making soda bottles, prescription ware, vials, flasks, packers’ ware, preservers, and fruit jars. The contracts-driven 1937 operating year is now attested by four independent lineages (Tips, Smith, Mackey, BRG/Roller).

On the closure year itself, BRG introduces a wrinkle: Brantley (1975:95) states Ball closed the factory in 1939, not 1938, and BRG judges Brantley “most likely correct” (rejecting Toulouse’s 1947, since the 1942 American Glass Review factory list already shows Three Rivers as “no report”). This sits against the 1938-dismantling picture above; the full argument belongs to the Closure Timeline Dispute article rather than here.

One possible asset trail from the takeover: Creswick (1987:129) lists a jar embossed “3 RIVERS * HA,” with the Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. as manufacturer. BRG reads the “HA” as the Hazel-Atlas monogram and infers the mold was a Three Rivers product-jar mold transferred to Hazel-Atlas, probably after Ball took over — possibly along with all or most of the Three Rivers product-jar molds — while cautioning that “HA” could instead be a mold code.

A February 5, 1938 deed has Ball Glass Corporation conveying a highway strip of the property to Live Oak County, consistent with the plant already being wound down by early 1938. Ball’s corporate presence in Three Rivers persisted at least into September 1938 (a Ball Glass Corporation reference letter for former employee Lucas Diaz is dated September 9, 1938). BRG explains why Ball still held the site into the 1950s: the company retained possession of the property after closing the factory, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the brothers to sell the Three Rivers holdings in 1947, and “after some dispute, the brothers sold the factory in September 1954” (Roller 1997). That September 1954 sale corroborates exactly what the county records already showed: the property — including the furnace tank — passed to Bryan Boyd and Harry J. Schulz of Live Oak County per a county deed recorded September 21, 1954. Per Lindholm’s notes, the furnace tank was still “in perfect working condition” when Boyd and Schulz bought it, and after their 1954 purchase they contacted several glass companies about operating the factory on a more conservative production — each said no — before eventually selling the dismantled furnace’s refractory materials to glass manufacturers in Mexico (correspondence dated 1958–1960).

The Antitrust Case

The Bottle Research Group chapter supplies documented pre-history for the anticompetitive pressure Tips alleged. Hartford-Empire licensed its feeder machines with caveats restricting each licensee’s production volume and product types; in August 1929 it licensed Three Rivers to use three feeders for the manufacture of beverage bottles, packers’ and prescription ware (Vatter 1955:91). But Three Rivers had inaugurated fruit-jar production in 1928 — outside that license scope, and squarely in Ball’s core market — and the glass house was known in the industry as a “price cutter,” refusing to adhere to the prices set by the large companies: Owens-Illinois, Thatcher, Hazel-Atlas, and Ball Brothers. Ball repeatedly sent notices to Three Rivers demanding it drop jar production (American Glass Review 1928:149; Roller 1997; Vatter 1955:91). BRG’s conclusion — “the combination of the Great Depression, Three Rivers’ sudden expansion, and ill will of the larger glass houses ushered in the undoing of the Texas company” — independently corroborates, from an academic industry study and trade-press records, the motive at the heart of Tips’ account: the majors, Ball above all, wanted Three Rivers’ jar production stopped.

Two sources describe a later antitrust action against Ball Brothers, but disagree on its scope and Tips’ account is considerably more specific:

  • Tips (1971 letter): “An Assistant Attorney General of the United States came to see me and told me they had found enough evidence of what Owens-Illinois Glass Co., Hartford Empire Co., and Ball Brothers had done to convict them of violating the anti-trust laws. They were tried in Toledo, Ohio and found guilty. This they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court upheld their conviction. This broke up the glass trust.” Three named defendants, a Toledo trial, and a Supreme Court appeal. Tips repeated the claim in the plural in his May 18, 1973 letter — “their indictment by the Federal Courts and their conviction” — again framing the defendants as the out-of-state companies collectively, not Ball alone.
  • Smith (1989 book): “the Ball Brothers Glass Company was later indicted for violation of the antitrust laws. Through testimony by Charles R. Tips and others, enough evidence was gathered to convict the Ball Brothers Glass Company. It was eventually forced to pay a fine for its actions.” One named defendant (Ball Brothers alone), no trial venue, no appeal, and a fine rather than the broader “broke up the glass trust” framing — though Smith does confirm Tips personally testified.

Tips’ description is consistent with the real, well-documented federal antitrust case Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 386 (1945), which addressed a patent-licensing pool in the glass-container industry involving Hartford-Empire, Owens-Illinois, and other major manufacturers. Neither source compiled here cites that case by name or docket, so this connection should be treated as a plausible identification worth independent verification — not a confirmed match. Given that even these two best-available secondary sources disagree on how many companies were convicted and by what process, the antitrust case’s exact scope should be treated as unresolved rather than settled fact.

BRG adds a concrete, dated event from the same era that strengthens — without settling — this identification: the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Ball to sell the Three Rivers holdings in 1947, and after some dispute Ball sold in September 1954 (Roller 1997). This order-to-sell is a divestiture remedy, distinct from the conviction Tips described — the kind of relief imposed during the Hartford-Empire antitrust remedies era — and the two should not be conflated. But it independently confirms that Ball’s Three Rivers holdings were entangled in Supreme Court–level antitrust proceedings a decade after the takeover, which fits Tips’ broader “glass trust” framing far better than Smith’s fine-only version.

Consequences for Workers

Several skilled Three Rivers Glass workers moved on to other Texas glass operations after the closure — for example, Carl Stendebach relocated to Palestine, Texas and continued working in a glass factory there; Smith’s book identifies that Palestine plant as an Owens-Illinois Glass Company operation. Tips himself states that, indirectly, Three Rivers Glass’s success spurred Owens-Illinois to build a large factory in Waco and prompted the Palestine plant as well. Per Smith, most other displaced workers moved to San Antonio, Dallas, or Houston, or found work locally in Three Rivers; Ball Brothers kept a night watchman at the idle site for several years afterward.

See Also

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