Owens-Illinois and the Hoffmann-Hayman Crystalvac Jars

The question: is there a connection to Owens-Illinois that the Hoffmann-Hayman (“H&H”) Coffee Co. of San Antonio switched to for its Crystalvac coffee-jar production before Three Rivers Glass Company was shut down?

The short answer: yes, there is a real Owens-Illinois connection — but the best-evidenced reading is dual-sourcing/overlap, not a clean switch triggered by the shutdown. Owens-Illinois-marked Crystalvac jars date to 1936–1939, running alongside the Three Rivers years rather than after them, and one contested jar is read as early as 1932. The physical-jar evidence is solid; the “O-I replaced Three Rivers in 1937” narrative is not established — the one source that raises it flags it as an open mystery.

The evidence on the jars

Everything specific to H&H comes from the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. itself — its website (handhcoffeefactory.com) is the primary holder of the surviving Crystalvac collection. What the jars show:

• Two makers’ marks appear on Crystalvac jars. The Three Rivers “star” mark on the small (one-pound) jars, with 601-series mold codes (601-1, -3, -4, -5, -7); and the Owens-Illinois “Diamond-Oval-I” mark on both one-pound and three-pound jars.
• The O-I plant code is “7” — Alton, Illinois, not Texas. These jars were made in the Midwest and shipped to San Antonio by rail. There was no local Texas Owens-Illinois plant in this period (see below).
• The O-I date codes read as the late 1930s: 1936 (“6”) and 1938 (“8”), with one three-pound jar read as “2” = 1932. Under the Owens-Illinois dating rule (single-digit year code = a 1930s year; a dot after the digit would mark 1940–45), these are unambiguously 1930s jars — contemporary with, not later than, the Three Rivers production.

A base photograph of that three-pound jar confirms the reading: the Owens-Illinois “Diamond-Oval-I” mark flanked by a 7 (plant code, Alton IL) and a single undotted 2 (date code → 1932), with a 2 mold number below.

The H&H site’s own consolidated conclusion is explicitly one of overlap:

“Collection specimens now date O-I supply to 1936–1939, overlapping the Three Rivers period rather than succeeding it. … Many Crystalvac blanks carry Owens-Illinois marks because Three Rivers had been in receivership since 1932 … meaning H&H was almost certainly dual-sourcing through the 1930s.”

And it leaves the causal question open:

“The unresolved mystery is whether Owens-Illinois replaced Three Rivers after it ‘was shutdown in 1937.’”

A correction on colour

A tempting shortcut — “clear jars are Three Rivers, amber jars are Owens-Illinois” — is backwards. Amber occurs only on the Three Rivers small jars; the Owens-Illinois output (both sizes) is clear only. The maker signal is the mark plus jar size, not the glass colour. A plausible split is that Three Rivers made the one-pound jars in Texas while Owens-Illinois supplied the three-pound size (and additional one-pound volume) from Alton — but H&H’s own researchers flag this size/maker mapping as still tentative.

Why “O-I replaced them locally” is anachronistic

Three Rivers folklore holds that a big Owens-Illinois factory in Texas undercut the little glasshouse. For the H&H question that framing does not work on the dates:

• Owens-Illinois had no Texas plant before 1944. The Waco plant (O-I Plant #15) opened February 22, 1944 — land bought 1940, built 1940–44 — six years after Three Rivers’ 1938 closure. The SHA plant register lists no Palestine, TX O-I plant (Michael David Smith’s 1989 book does call the Palestine plant an O-I plant — an unresolved discrepancy). The nearest O-I facility in the 1930s, Okmulgee OK, was idle after 1932.
• But O-I had ample national capacity. Formed in 1929 as the world’s largest glass company, its 1933 catalog explicitly listed “coffee and candy jars,” and by 1936 nearly half its output was food/medicine/toiletry containers. Supplying a San Antonio coffee account by rail from Alton was routine for a national conglomerate — which is exactly what the “7” plant code on the jars records.

So any Owens-Illinois glass reaching H&H before 1938 came from Illinois by rail, concurrent with the Three Rivers orders — not from a Texas plant that displaced Three Rivers.

The broader pattern — real, but H&H isn’t in the literature

Owens-Illinois is woven through the Three Rivers story on the industry side: it was one of the big houses (with Thatcher, Hazel-Atlas, and Ball) whose prices Three Rivers refused to hold to, and it was a co-defendant in the patent-pool antitrust case tied to Ball Brothers Foreclosure and Antitrust Case. And Bill Lockhart’s SHA “Bottles on the Border” scholarship documents a genuine Three Rivers-customer-to-Owens-Illinois migration:

• Union Bottling Works (El Paso) — an O-I 7-oz variant dated 1932, probably Union’s last order, succeeding earlier Three Rivers supply.
• Nicholson Bottling Works (El Paso) — a bottle marked both “3 RIVERS ★” and “Ball” (script), datable only to 1937, Ball’s single year running the Three Rivers plant.
• El Paso Dr Pepper (Empire Products) — 1950s bottles explicitly Owens-Illinois-made (plant 15, date code 52 = 1952).

This shows the mechanism was common: when a Three Rivers customer’s supply changed hands, Owens-Illinois was frequently the successor. But Hoffmann-Hayman and Crystalvac appear nowhere in the Lockhart/SHA/Bottle Research Group corpus. The H&H↔O-I connection rests entirely on the company’s own collector site (which cites Smith 1989, not Lockhart). That is why this article is rated medium confidence: the physical-jar evidence is real and the surrounding facts are well-sourced, but the specific H&H attribution has not been corroborated in the peer-reviewed literature, and its own author treats the “takeover” reading as unproven.

Bottom line

• Connection to Owens-Illinois: yes. H&H Crystalvac jars carry Owens-Illinois marks (Alton, IL, plant 7), dated 1936–1939 with a contested 1932 outlier.
• “Switched to O-I before TRG shut down”: partly, but not as a clean switch. The best reading is dual-sourcing — O-I ran alongside Three Rivers through the 1930s — with O-I naturally absorbing the remaining volume once Three Rivers was foreclosed (Dec 1936) and dissolved (Jan 1937) and Ball wound the plant down in 1938. There is no evidence of a single discrete “switch” event, and no local Texas O-I plant was involved.
• The 1932 jar is corroborated. A base photograph of the O-I three-pound jar supports the “2” = 1932 date code (plant 7, Alton IL), pushing O-I involvement to the very start of the Crystalvac line — strong evidence for dual-sourcing from 1932. Tracked, with its residual caveat, as open question W-1; cross-checking Smith 1989 and more examples would close it fully.

See Also

• Three Rivers Glass Company — the manufacturer and its rivalry with the big glass houses
• Known Customers — H&H’s 1932 quarter-million-jar order in the customer roster
• Maker’s Marks — the star marks vs. the Owens-Illinois Diamond-Oval-I mark and how to date each
• Ball Brothers Foreclosure and Antitrust Case — Owens-Illinois as antitrust co-defendant; the December 1936 foreclosure
• Closure Timeline Dispute — the 1936–1938 shutdown sequence this question turns on
• Glass Colors — why the clear-vs-amber Crystalvac split is about maker and jar size, not a Three Rivers colour line (aqua/green are misreadings)