Three Rivers Glass search

concepts · updated 2026-07-26

Three Rivers Glass — Designers and Mold Makers

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

Who actually designed and cut the molds for Three Rivers glass. The named record is thin: David J. Jones (staff mould maker from 1928), the anonymous 'master mold makers' H. S. Warrick brought from Ohio in 1922, six unnamed full-time bottle designers by 1930, and Gutzon Borglum — whose celebrated design-staff connection rests on one unreliable sentence and is uncorroborated by every Borglum-focused archive; the 'residing in Beeville' detail fits his son Lincoln instead. Includes the trade context: in the period industry the 'artists' were designers on paper and chipper-engravers in iron, distinct crafts TRG demonstrably staffed by 1928–1930.

The honest answer to “who were the artists behind the Three Rivers molds” is: one named craftsman, one contested celebrity, and a room of anonymous professionals. David J. Jones is the only staff mold maker the record names; the six full-time bottle designers of 1930 are unnamed in every accessible source; and the famous Gutzon Borglum connection — repeated throughout collector literature — traces to a single unreliable sentence.

The named record

David J. Jones — mould maker, 1928. The Lindholm marker-research binder records “DAVID J JONES MOULD MAKER 1928” (later of 1107 E. Bowie, Beeville), and the 1973 dedication coverage lists “David Jones, mold maker, now of Beeville” among the honored former workers who performed the unveiling. He is the only individual the record explicitly attaches to the mold shop — and he evidently designed as well as cut: the collector record preserves his dispute over the “Big Chief” (Blackburn Bros.) bottle, Jones saying his own design for it was larger and differently proportioned. That makes Jones the one person documented on both sides of the design/mold-making divide.

The anonymous Ohio contingent, 1922. When production began hand-blown, plant manager H. S. Warrick — himself a Cleveland glass man — brought skilled artisans from the northern glass districts. Tips’ own 1973 account: “Some skilled glass blowers and a few mould makers were brought down from the north and a few local men were employed.” None are named in any source this wiki holds.

Six full-time bottle designers, ca. 1930. Smith’s Texas Glass (1989) states the company payroll of 150+ included “six full-time bottle designers” at its peak. No source — Smith included — names any of them except the contested Borglum (below). A targeted search of newspapers, collector literature, the state marker record, and local-history material found no other designer named anywhere accessible.

Harold Tremblay — machines, not molds. The engineer hired from Monterrey in 1925 built the company’s bottle machines (bill of sale March 15, 1928, Patent 1,648,792). No source credits him with mold cutting or design, though his machine shop was the organizational prerequisite for in-house mold work.

The Borglum question

Smith (1989) writes that “Belgian sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who was residing in nearby Beeville,” joined the design staff in late 1930, and a factory exhibit caption asserts “The famous sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, has designed bottles for Three Rivers Glass Company.” This is the entire evidentiary base, and it is shaky:

  • The sentence contains two demonstrable errors. Borglum was American (born Idaho Territory, Danish parents), not Belgian. And no Borglum source places Gutzon in Beeville — his documented Texas base from 1925 was the Menger Hotel and the Brackenridge Park studio in San Antonio (the TSHA biography and the TAMU-CC papers agree).
  • The Beeville detail fits the wrong Borglum. The Borglum whom Beeville itself commemorates (2016 Texas Historical Marker) is Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son and Rushmore collaborator, who married Beeville descendant Louella Jones and settled there — but his documented Bee County ties begin in 1938, after the factory era. The most economical reading is that local lore fused the famous father with the son’s later South Texas presence.
  • Borglum-focused sources are uniformly silent. The TSHA Handbook biography of his Texas period and the TAMU-CC Gutzon Borglum Texas Papers (the archival collection specifically devoted to his Texas projects, successful and failed) mention no glass work, no Beeville, no Three Rivers.
  • What survives scrutiny: the chronology is possible — Borglum wintered in San Antonio through the Rushmore years, roughly 60 miles from Three Rivers, and took eclectic commercial commissions. And no specific Three Rivers design (the Dragon emboss, the crackle finish, the ribbed patterns) has ever been attributed to him anywhere.

This wiki’s assessment: unverified collector lore until a period document surfaces — treat as “asserted by Smith and one exhibit caption; uncorroborated by every Borglum archive; the Beeville detail probably belongs to Lincoln Borglum.”

What “artist” meant in a 1920s mold shop

Period trade practice (Wheaton Arts’ documentation of the mold-making trade) separates three crafts that answer this question at different levels:

  1. Designers worked on paper and in models — renderings for private-mold customers whose approval preceded any steel-cutting. TRG’s “six full-time designers” belong here; a staff that size at a regional plant reads as a sales-driven private-mold operation (dairies, bottlers, and after 1933, breweries).
  2. Mold makers/machinists (Jones’s craft) turned designs into cast-iron tooling and maintained it — work that mechanization made more essential, not less: the Owens machine “eliminated the jobs of the glassblower… but it did not do away with the need for molds and moldmakers.”
  3. Chipper-engravers — in the trade’s own vocabulary, the “artists who possessed the sculpting skills necessary to carve intaglio designs with chisels, riffles and files” (87–378 documented hours per ornate pattern). Whether TRG employed a dedicated chipper or Jones covered engraving is unrecorded.

TRG’s trajectory matches the standard regional-plant pattern: imported northern expertise and (almost certainly) purchased molds in the hand era (1922–25); Tremblay’s machine shop from 1925; a staff mold maker by 1928 — the tipping point where repair, lettering-plate changes, and re-cutting moved in-house. The maker’s-mark variations BRG attributes to “the whims of the mold makers” are the surviving physical record of these anonymous hands, and the “3 RIVERS ★ HA” jar shows the molds outlived the company as capital assets, re-cut in the documented Hazel-Atlas manner (ghosted Whitney/Atlas precedent).

Open leads

The names likely exist in sources this wiki cannot reach from the web: the Portal to Texas History newspaper scans (Three Rivers Progress/News — bot-walled), the 1930 census enumeration for Three Rivers (occupation column), the Grace Armantrout Museum’s holdings (Sellman, From Acorns to Live Oaks; Sparkman, The People’s History of Live Oak County, 1981), and the unpublished 1973 Johnson/McMillan factory book manuscript.

See Also

Sources