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Charles R. Tips

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Charles Rudolph Tips (born June 5, 1892) founded the town of Three Rivers, Texas in 1913 and the Three Rivers Glass Company in 1922, built it into a national glass-container concern through the 1920s, and lost it to Ball Brothers Glass Company in a Depression-era foreclosure he attributed to a treacherous attorney — an account he documented in detail in two letters written for the town's 1973 historical marker dedication.

Charles Rudolph Tips (June 5, 1892 – date of death not established from sources compiled so far) founded both the town of Three Rivers, Texas and the Three Rivers Glass Company that operated there. Two detailed letters he wrote in 1971 and 1973 for the town’s historical marker dedication are the fullest first-person account of the company’s rise and its loss to Ball Brothers Foreclosure and Antitrust Case during the Depression.

Founding Three Rivers (1913–1914)

Tips graduated from the University of Texas in 1912 and, inspired by cattle-and-land baron George West’s success founding towns on his Live Oak County ranch, began scouting land along a newly surveyed San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad line. He identified a tract near the confluence of the Frio, Nueces, and Atascosa Rivers, principally owned by Annie Hamilton of Cuero and ranchers James Mahoney and James Murray. The Hamiltons had already agreed to pay the railroad $5,000 to route the line through their property in exchange for a depot named “Hamiltonburg”; Tips organized investors to buy a 200-acre tract including the depot site and cover that bonus. A land company was formed with seven directors — Tips himself was too young to serve, not yet 21. The first train reached Hamiltonburg on June 5, 1913 — Tips’ 21st birthday — and the town held its grand opening July 4, 1913. In early 1914, after the U.S. Post Office objected that “Hamiltonburg” was too easily confused with Hamilton, Texas, Tips declined a petition to rename the town after himself and proposed “Three Rivers” instead; the change took effect May 1, 1914.

He lived there with his wife and first child until the U.S. entered World War I; he volunteered for Army service in 1917. After the war, in 1919, he helped organize the Dallas Joint Stock Land Bank, making farm and ranch loans across Texas from a San Antonio headquarters — but by his own account his “greatest interest was still in Three Rivers.”

Founding the Glass Factory (1921–1922)

The idea traced to successful natural-gas well drilling near Three Rivers shortly after WWI (on land Tips owned and nearby tracts) and to the observation that sand from north of Three Rivers was already being shipped to a glass factory in Monterrey, Mexico. By 1922 that gas sat unused locally. Tips advertised in a national glass-trade magazine touting Three Rivers’ advantages for glassmaking; H. L. Warrick of Cleveland, Ohio answered — his own factory had recently burned down, and he told Tips he could build and start a factory in Three Rivers if Tips raised $50,000. Tips put in what cash he could and recruited friends to cover the rest, including James Capp/Kapp (a San Antonio furniture-store owner), Harry H. Rogers (San Antonio and Tulsa), Arthur Morton, and San Antonio attorney Pat Swearingen. The Three Rivers Glass Company was incorporated in May 1922 with $50,000 capital; Kapp became the company’s first president, with Tips as secretary and treasurer (Tips did not become president until 1929 — see Building and Running the Factory, below). The Bottle Research Group’s 2019 encyclopedia chapter — which spells the surname “Tipps” — independently attests his founder role: “Charles R. Tipps was the man primarily responsible for creating the company. He masterminded the idea… and gathered the needed capital” (Roller 1997; Smith 1989:1-7). BRG names the 1922 president as “James Knapp,” a spelling variant of the Kapp/Capp of Smith and the period sources.

The first printed record Kevin Mackey’s research turned up (Texas Trade Review and Industrial Record, July 15, 1921) credits the decision to locate the factory at Three Rivers — after Finkbeiner had surveyed San Diego and Los Angeles as alternatives — to John Finkbeiner, not Warrick, and dates Tips’ advertisement to 1921. Tips’ own 1973 speech remembers events somewhat differently, crediting Warrick’s response to the ad as the origin and not mentioning Finkbeiner until the mechanization phase. Mackey explicitly flags this as a case where “physical evidence tends to be more accurate than people’s memory” — Tips was recounting events from roughly 50 years earlier. See Three Rivers Glass Closure Timeline Dispute for the parallel pattern in his account of the company’s final years.

Building and Running the Factory

Production began hand-blown, with skilled glassblowers and mould makers brought down from the north alongside local hires. Tips had to keep raising money as costs ran ahead of Warrick’s original estimate. Recognizing that hand-blown production couldn’t compete, Tips sought automated machinery — but the Hartford Empire Company held a near-total patent monopoly on glass container machinery and refused to license it to Three Rivers. Tips travelled to Monterrey, Mexico, and found that the glass factory there had built its own machinery; he recruited the engineer who had done it — an American then living in Mexico. Tips’ 1973 speech spells the name “Trembley,” but Tips’ own 1971 letter, a September 2, 1926 news item, and the 1928 bill of sale all spell it “A. F. Tremblay” (Mackey gives his first name as Harold; the Bottle Research Group corroborates the Monterrey hiring story and the first name, writing that “Tipps hired Harold Trembly” to build the machinery) — Tremblay relocated to Three Rivers (in 1924) to build equipment. Once Hartford Empire saw the machine worked, they relented and agreed to sell Tips the rest of the equipment he needed. A surviving March 15, 1928 bill of sale records Tremblay selling the company a patented bottle-blowing machine (U.S. Patent No. 1,648,792) for $6,000.

Tips ran the company’s day-to-day business through the 1920s as secretary/treasurer and general manager (per Smith, D. J. Woodward became the company’s first vice president once the operation was mechanized and modernized — though the April 6, 1922 Manufacturers Record incorporation notice already lists A. H. Morton as vice president): opening a Dallas sales office, shifting distribution from rail to truck, building out district sales offices, and recruiting key staff (R. A. Ellerman for the office/purchasing side; Glover, then Askew, as sales managers). In 1928 he moved his family back to Three Rivers, building a home on Murray Hill overlooking the town he’d commissioned city planner Harland Bartholomew to lay out. In the December 2, 1928 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Tips “bragged that 1928 was the fifth consecutive year that the plant had doubled its capacity” (as quoted by the Bottle Research Group). In 1929 Tips persuaded Houston financier W. L. Moody III to buy $100,000 of company stock to fund additional molds and equipment; that transaction is when Tips himself became company president, with Moody and Tips sharing controlling interest.

He was also active in state industrial boosterism: elected a Vice President of the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, he helped found Progressive Texans, Inc. — the statewide organization of the East, West, and South Texas Chambers of Commerce behind the “What Texas Makes, Makes Texas” campaign, headed by John Carpenter of Texas Power & Light, with Tips as a vice president and general campaign chairman for the state — a campaign he credits with helping Three Rivers Glass compete against out-of-state rivals on brand loyalty.

The Depression, the RFC Loan, and Losing the Factory

By 1929 Tips’ financial partner W. L. Moody III had lost much of his fortune in the crash, and Tips mortgaged his own land and home to keep the company afloat. He personally intervened to help save the bank at Three Rivers via a connection to Vice President John Garner. For a stretch, company payroll checks — payable only once bottles were sold — functioned as informal local currency, accepted by merchants and wholesalers on trust.

Tips sought federal help: he obtained approval in principle for a $100,000 Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan (via RFC head Jesse Jones), conditioned on the holders of the factory’s first mortgage note (a Tulsa, Oklahoma lending firm) agreeing to give the RFC’s loan first priority. The company retained San Antonio attorney William Church — who had prior business dealings with the Tulsa lender per Smith; Tips’ 1973 speech remembers Church as the attorney already representing the Tulsa firm — and paid him $500 to travel and secure that agreement. Unknown to Tips and the board, Church was also already representing Ball Brothers Glass Company of Muncie, Indiana, per Michael David Smith’s 1989 account; instead of securing the agreement, Church tipped Ball off to the company’s precarious finances. Ball then bought the mortgage notes and foreclosed — see Ball Brothers Foreclosure and Antitrust Case for the full mechanism, including where Tips’ and Smith’s accounts diverge on the exact date and on the antitrust case’s scope. “I had mortgaged all of my land, my home and everything I had to save the Glass Factory and lost it all,” Tips wrote in 1973.

After losing the factory (operationally, by most corroborating accounts, in December 1936, though Smith’s 1989 book gives 1937), Tips continued selling glass under contracts he had already secured, operating as president of a separate sales entity — see Tips Glass Sales Corporation — and attempted to organize a new glass factory in Houston, funded partly by withholding money from employees’ paychecks in exchange for shares; per a former employee’s account, it “never got started.”

Later Life

Tips left Three Rivers “without knowing where I would get the money for the next meal,” and was recalled to active Army duty for the Second World War, serving roughly five years. He rebuilt a career as a Dallas-area real estate and community developer (his 1973 letterhead reads “More Than 50 Years Successful Experience in New Community Development,” 1312 South Ervay, Dallas). Governor Allan Shivers appointed him one of the first eighteen members of the Texas State Historical Survey Committee (predecessor of the Texas Historical Commission) — by his own account just after he finished his second term as President General of the Sons of the Republic of Texas — and he served as first vice president and then, for 1959–1961, as the second president of both the committee and the related Historical Foundation, of which he remained an Honorary Director. By his own account he held the rank of Colonel (retired) by 1973.

Tips was to deliver the keynote at the May 26, 1973 dedication of the Texas Historical Marker for the Three Rivers Glass Factory site, but he and his wife Hazel were in a car wreck at Waco en route from Dallas; his prepared speech was read in his absence by Viola Adlof.

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