Three Rivers Glass — the Bastrop, Louisiana Plant

From June 1929 until 1933, Three Rivers Glass Co. ran a second factory at Bastrop, Louisiana — the former Bastrop Glass Co. plant [ev-0042]. It was the first of the firm’s two plants to go, dropping out of the trade listings three years before the Texas plant stopped producing [ev-0042].

That Three Rivers occupied a plant at Bastrop is settled, and settled from two directions: the Bottle Research Group’s trade-listing evidence [ev-0042] and a competitor’s private letter of November 1929 that reports the purchase as current news [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. Almost everything else below — every date before 1929 and every date after it — rests on BRG alone, and the reader should hold that in view throughout. The distinction that matters for this article is not between strong and weak claims but between two questions: whether Three Rivers occupied a plant at Bastrop, which is settled, and what it wanted the plant for, which is not.

The plant before Three Rivers, 1919–1929

The factory predates Three Rivers’ involvement by a decade.

• Late 1919 — The Ouachita Valley Glass Co. contracts to have a factory built at Bastrop with a 35-ton, 12-ring continuous tank. Theodore Shockney president, James H. Moroney vice president, G. Hiatt general manager, Bert E. Noodbury secretary, Zora C. Cox treasurer, Mike Somers plant manager [ev-0042].
• 1923-05 — The factory is “sold under foreclosure proceedings to representatives of the Frost Johnson Lumber Co.” for $12,500 [ev-0042].
• 1923-05 — The Bastrop Glass Co. is organised, probably by Frost Johnson interests, to take over the plant; the fires are lit on July 25 [ev-0042].
• 1923-09 — The Southern Glass Co. of Winchester, Indiana, leases the factory [ev-0042].
• 1923–1929 — A gap. BRG states it plainly: “We have not discovered whether Southern Glass continued to operate the plant or only leased it temporarily while its own was built” [ev-0042].
• 1929-06 — Three Rivers takes over the plant of the former Bastrop Glass Co. BRG, having named the gap, adds: “In any event, the Three Rivers occupation in 1929 is confirmed” [ev-0042].
• 1929-11-11 — Independent confirmation, from a source that had no connection to BRG’s and was written five months after the fact. H. C. Mandeville, chairman of the Thatcher Manufacturing Company, reporting privately to the president of a rival glass firm on what Three Rivers was doing: “Mr. Tipps of the Three Rivers Glass Company is trying to expand his business and has bought an old plant at Bastrop, La. There is nothing much there, but he claims he is going to improve the plant and also that he is trying to get together a combination of glass manufacturers in the South” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716].

Under Three Rivers, 1929–1933

The takeover fell in the firm’s strongest year. Three Rivers raised its capital to $250,000 by August 1929 and took Hartford-Empire feeder licences the same month [ev-0042].

By 1930 the firm used “one 35-ton tank and one 45-ton tank, presumably a single tank at each plant” [ev-0042]. BRG’s “presumably” is doing real work in that sentence, and it should not be read away: the 35-ton figure matches the tank the Ouachita Valley Glass Co. installed at Bastrop in 1919, which is what makes the one-per-plant reading attractive, but BRG does not claim to have established it. A footnote in the same passage records a further loose end — “It is not clear what happened to the other two tanks” [ev-0042].

As the Depression deepened, Bastrop went first. Three Rivers “closed the Bastrop factory first — last listed in 1933” in the American Glass Review Glass Factory Yearbook [ev-0042]. The Texas plant kept producing under receivership until 1936 [ev-0042].

Disputed: what the plant was for

BRG’s account describes an operating second factory — listed under Three Rivers from 1929, dropped in 1933, and plausibly carrying one of the firm’s two tanks [ev-0042].

Kevin Mackey states the opposite purpose flatly: “The purchase of the glass factory in Louisiana, to reopen it, was a ruse to get the equipment to expand the Three Rivers plant” [ev-0019].

The two are not reconcilable from what is held. Mackey names no dates, no plant name, and gives no source for the characterisation, so it cannot be weighed against BRG’s trade-listing evidence on equal terms. But it is not nothing either: Mackey corroborates independently that Three Rivers acquired a Louisiana glass plant. He and the trial record are the only held sources besides BRG that know the acquisition happened at all, and only Mackey offers a purpose. The conflict is recorded here and left open.

Three observations bear on it without settling it. A plant listed in the trade directories for four consecutive years is an odd shape for an equipment-stripping manoeuvre [ev-0042]. Against that, the firm was simultaneously blocked from buying the Hartford-Empire machinery it most wanted — Hartford refused Three Rivers a milk-bottle licence outright and left one feeder deliberately unlicensed [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60862] — which is exactly the circumstance in which acquiring a competitor’s installed equipment would be attractive.

The third is new here and cuts towards BRG. In November 1929 Tips was telling a prospective merger partner that he had bought the plant and “is going to improve” it [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. That is a contemporaneous statement of intent, reported at one remove by a man with no reason to flatter him — Mandeville’s next sentence is that “There is nothing much there” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. It is not proof: a man courting investment would say he meant to run a plant whether he did or not, and Mandeville was recording what Tips claimed, not what Tips did. But it is the only contemporaneous evidence held of what Three Rivers said Bastrop was for, and it is not “a ruse to get the equipment.”

What no source says

The silence around Bastrop is worth stating, because it is easy to mistake for disagreement. Smith’s 1989 book [@ev-0038; @ev-0039], Tips’ own retrospective accounts and the marker research binder [ev-0041], and Mackey’s 2017 article collection [ev-0040] never mention Bastrop or a second plant. None of them contradicts BRG. They simply do not address it — including Tips, who was president of the company that owned it, and who spoke about the plant freely enough in 1929 [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716] and not at all in the accounts he wrote forty years later [ev-0041].

The trial record breaks that silence only once. Bastrop appears in it in a single sentence, in a letter about something else, and nowhere in the sworn testimony about Three Rivers’ collapse [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. The Louisiana plant was not a subject anyone at that trial had a reason to raise.

No maker’s mark is attributed specifically to the Bastrop plant [ev-0042], and no colour is attributed to it in any yearbook listing [ev-0042]. Nothing held distinguishes Bastrop ware from Texas ware.

The sources that would settle the purpose question are named in BRG’s own citations and are not held: Roller’s 1997 notes, the National Glass Budget of 1919, Glass Industry for May and September 1923, Manufacturer’s Record for July 1923, and the American Glass Review yearbooks for 1929 through 1933 [ev-0042].