What Was Left

The Texas Historical Commission’s 1973 marker gives the factory’s afterlife eight words: “In later years, factory site became location of a warehouse” [ev-0011]. The research file assembled to justify that marker contains a county deed chain, a melting furnace that outlived the buildings by twenty years, five tenants sharing the ground in the early 1970s, a title conflict nobody had resolved, and eighteen months of correspondence in Spanish about selling the furnace’s brick to Mexico [ev-0041]. This article is about the thirty-five years the bronze compresses.

It matters for a reason beyond tidiness. The closure articles end in 1938 with one question open — when the plant was finally stripped — and the answer turns out not to be a date. The plant came down in two stages twenty years apart, and the sources that say “dismantled in 1938” are describing the first stage only.

The first dismantling

Every narrative source held says the same thing about 1937 and 1938, and they say it in nearly the same words. Tips’ own biographical sheet: the factory “was sold to a northern concern in 1937 and dismantled shortly afterwards” [@ev-0041, p. 41]. Mackey: “In 1938 they dismantled the plant” [ev-0040]. The Texas Almanac for 1956-1957: sold in 1937 “to out-of-state interests that subsequently dismantled it” [ev-0040]. The marker: “Sold in 1937 to Ball Glass Company, it was closed in 1938” [ev-0011].

Smith is the only one who describes the process rather than naming it. Ball kept the plant running through 1937 to finish the contracts it had inherited, completed the last of them in the closing days of the year, and “then quietly began to dismantle the operation.” Afterward “the Ball Brothers Company kept a night watchman at the site for several years,” and “there was apparently a warehouse full of bottles and equipment, but it was eventually moved” [ev-0039].

Two things in that passage are worth holding onto. A night watchman is not posted over a bare lot, and a warehouse of bottles that took years to move is not an empty building. Whatever came down in 1938, something was still there worth guarding.

The deed record confirms the ownership rather than the demolition. Live Oak County Book 71, p. 507: Tips sold the Three Rivers Glass Company and its land to the Ball Glass Corporation, signed 31 March 1938 and filed 11 April 1938. Book 70, p. 313, recorded earlier — 5 February 1938 — has Ball Glass Corporation deeding the county a strip averaging twenty-one feet for State Highway No. 202 [@ev-0041, p. 62]. Ball was disposing of frontage six weeks before Tips signed the conveyance, which is consistent with the foreclosure having already put Ball in possession and the March deed clearing up what the foreclosure had not.

And the last letter this expert holds on Ball Glass Corporation letterhead is dated 9 September 1938 and signed by C. C. Cook, Factory Manager. It is a character reference for Lucas Diaz, “formerly employed by BALL GLASS CORP. of Three Rivers, Texas,” who had been “employed as tank supervisor while under my super[vision] for three years” and who “thoroughly understands the operation of a glass tank” [@ev-0041, p. 64]. A factory manager was still writing letters from the plant nine months after the sale closed, and what he was writing was a reference for the man who had run the furnace.

The tank

The tank was not dismantled in 1938. It was still there in 1954, and it worked.

The binder holds a photograph of it with a caption in the compiler’s hand:

This is a picture of the TANK installed in the Three Rivers Glass Factory shortly before Ball Glass Company bought the Three Rivers Company out. The Ball Glass Company [r]emodeled it some and when Boyd and Schulz bought Ball Company out it was in perfect working condition [@ev-0041, p. 65].

Live Oak County Vol. 164, p. 285, recorded 21 September 1954: the Ball Glass Corporation sold all remaining Glass Company property to Bryan Boyd and Harry J. Schulz of Live Oak County [@ev-0041, p. 62]. The Bottle Research Group independently reports a sale in September 1954 “after some dispute” [ev-0042]. So Ball held the site for sixteen years after it stopped making bottles there, and sold it with a functioning 125-ton continuous tank furnace still standing in it [ev-0041].

What Boyd and Schulz tried to do with it is the part of this story that has no parallel anywhere else in the record. Schulz recorded that the two of them “contacted several Glass Companies to operate the Factory on a more conservative production, but a ‘No’ was the answer from each company” [@ev-0041, p. 65]. Twenty years after the plant closed, two men in Live Oak County went looking for someone to light the furnace again, and were turned down by everyone they asked. Schulz’s own note points the reader at Tips’ letter of 11 October for the reason [@ev-0041, p. 65] — which is to say, at the account of the industry that fills the rest of the binder.

Selling the brick

Having failed to find an operator, they went after the value that was left, which was the refractory lining. A glass tank is a box of firebrick, and firebrick that has held molten glass and cooled intact is worth money to somebody building a furnace.

The correspondence runs from June 1958 to March 1960, in Spanish with translations made for the research file by Cindy Smith of George West, then a student at Lynchburg College who had spent a term and a semester at La Academia Hispano-Americana in San Miguel de Allende [@ev-0041, p. 67]. All of it is addressed to “Sr. Harry J. Schultz, Attorney At Law, Three Rivers, Texas.”

11 June 1958. Vidriera “Nuevo León,” S.A., of Monterrey — Fabricantes de Artículos de Vidrio — replies to a letter of 31 May: “what interests us are the refractory blocks, and we are going to do everything possible to come and see it, to see if the transaction suits us” [@ev-0041, p. 67].

2 February 1959. Eight months later, nobody has come. “Our factory is small and we have not been able to resolve certain affairs that we have pending to enable us to visit you and see if it is possible to deal with the rock that you have offered us. We are hoping to make this visit in a month more [or] less, provided that you have no other engagement that you are awaiting or possibly some other candidate, in which case, of course, you may sell it. All that we ask is that in such a case you let us know so that we do not come” [@ev-0041, p. 68].

17 March 1959. A conference has been held with Sr. Chav[a]na on Saturday the 14th, and the writer has located “Señor Ovidio Garza, who was the other interested party in the refractory material that you have,” who “has to be away and won’t be back until the first part of April.” They will write again “so that we can come to an agreement as to the exact date we should come to terminate the transaction” [@ev-0041, p. 69].

6 November 1959. Twenty months in: “I hadn’t written to you because we have been battling to obtain the permit enabling us to bring the rock and now that they are going to give it to us they are insisting that we give the exact weight of the rock, and this is why we are courteously asking that you give me the said weight” [@ev-0041, p. 70].

22 March 1960. A different firm, in a different city — Representaciones Técnicas, S.A., of Mexico City, dealers in industrial chemicals, raw materials and machinery — writes cold:

We understand that you have made shipments of REFRACTORY MATERIALS TO OUR COUNTRY. Our Company is greatly interested in purchasing this kind of materials to be used in furnaces for glass. We beg you to be kind enough in informing us about the different types of this material that you have available for the market in México, sending us your quotation prices for quantities of 5,000 and 10,000 kilos c.i.f. Veracruz [@ev-0041, p. 71].

They took a small-town attorney with one dead furnace to sell for a refractory materials house with a catalogue and a price list.

What the file does not show

The caption above the letters says the tank “was dismantled and sold to two Companies in Mexico” [@ev-0041, p. 65]. The letters held beneath it do not show that, and the distinction is worth making precisely because the compiler was in a position to know and this expert is not.

What the letters show is one company — Vidriera “Nuevo León,” S.A. — interested for twenty months without visiting; a second interested party who is a named individual, Sr. Ovidio Garza, and not a company; an import permit still unobtained in November 1959; and a request for a weight that suggests nothing had yet been loaded. The only support for a completed sale is the March 1960 letter from a third firm that had heard shipments were being made — hearsay from a stranger, and hearsay that also got Schulz’s trade wrong.

None of that makes the caption false. Thelma Lindholm wrote it around 1971 with the file in front of her and, presumably, with Schulz or Boyd to ask. It means only that the assertion rests on her, not on the documents she filed under it, and an article that repeats it as though the letters proved it would be reporting a summary as a source. This expert’s own primary-source timeline made exactly that error and has been corrected.

The names in these letters are OCR damage on top of Spanish on top of a signature. One correspondent is signed “Custodio Chavena,” referred to as “Sr. Chav[a]na,” typed as “C. Chavira,” and initialled “CCH” and “CCS” [@ev-0041, pp. 67-70]. The addressee is “Schultz” on four letters, “Schuetz” on a fifth, and “Schulz” in the county deed abstract [@ev-0041, pp. 62, 67-70]. This article uses Schulz, because the deed does.

The ground itself

Page 62 of the binder ends with a note: “The enlarged block shows how the land site is used at present, 1971. Information from Bryan Boyd” [@ev-0041, p. 62]. Boyd was one of the two owners, so the tenancy that follows comes from the landlord.

The legend lists, on the old factory ground: the S.A.U.&G. R.R., “for storing trucks, mfg. cement bridges and etc. stores equipment here”; the Perfection Cement Company of Alice, Texas; the Three Rivers Farmer’s Co-Op, for “grain storage and loading space”; Stin-Hall & Co. of New York, which “stores materials for their Uranium Plant east of O[a]kville”; and the River Rock Material Co. Inc., with “loading space for loading on Rail Road Cars.” A “Schulz Area” is marked, and the railroad appears twice. Under it all, in the compiler’s own voice: “True, the Three Rivers Glass Factory closed, but the property is an income to the town of Three Rivers” [@ev-0041, p. 73].

River Rock’s foreman Grady Dubose told the compiler that his company “went into operation approx. four years ago (1968) on big scale production,” which dates the survey to about 1972 rather than to the 1971 on the earlier page [@ev-0041, p. 74].

The newspaper account of the year before describes the same ground from outside. The Alice Echo-News of 1 August 1971 reports that the sheds, the machinery and “a large railroad loading dock, which comprised the factory, have long since been dismantled and a tin building used for grain storage occupies the land now”; that the buyer of 1937 was expected to remodel and dismantled instead; and that “it is believed that some of the original lumber was used in the construction of the building now occupying the site” [@ev-0041, p. 42].

That last sentence is the marker’s warehouse. The marker says the site “became location of a warehouse” [ev-0011]; the binder says the warehouse may be partly built out of the factory.

One later measurement of the ground survives, from outside this article’s window. Smith closes his account of the company by noting that Three Rivers “has other industries, most notably the huge Diamond Shamrock gasoline refinery that stands high over the south end of the town - not fifty yards from the site of the glass plant” [@ev-0038, p. 27; @ev-0039, p. 27]. That was written in 1989, sixteen years after the survey above, and it is the only thing held here that fixes the factory ground against a landmark still standing.

Thelma Lindholm read that article and corrected it in the margin. Where the reporter wrote that the plant was “the first glass factory in the United States,” she wrote that it “should have read… the first glass factory in Live Oak County” [@ev-0041, p. 42]. The correction is characteristic of the whole file: the compiler assembling the case for a marker was also the person most willing to cut the claim down.

The lots on Block 11

One line on the plat has no story attached to it anywhere else in the record: “Lots 1 to 5, Blk 11, sold by Mrs. Mary Ella Tips to Mexicans; are in conflict with the Ball Glass Corp. property” [@ev-0041, p. 63].

Read plainly, it records that Tips’ wife sold five town lots to buyers the surveyor identified only by nationality, and that the boundaries of what she sold overlap what Ball later took. Nothing held says when the sale happened, who the buyers were, or whether the conflict was ever resolved. It is set down here because a title conflict on the factory block is a fact about the site, and because leaving it out of an article about the site would be a choice made for comfort.

What this expert does not hold about the site

• Any deed. The chain above is a set of abstracts copied into the marker research from the county clerk’s office at George West [@ev-0041, p. 62]. No instrument has been seen. The volume and page numbers are the compiler’s.
• Whether the tank was ever shipped. See above. The file ends in March 1960 with a stranger’s understanding that something had gone south.
• What Boyd and Schulz paid, or what the brick was worth. Neither the 1954 price nor any figure from the Mexican correspondence is held.
• Which glass companies refused to operate the plant in the 1950s. Schulz says “several” and names none [@ev-0041, p. 65].
• When the buildings actually came down. The narrative sources agree on 1938 and none of them is a document from 1938. The one contemporaneous item held from that year shows a factory manager still in place in September [@ev-0041, p. 64].
• The warehouse. Whether the tin building of 1971 is the “warehouse full of bottles and equipment” Smith describes [ev-0039], the grain-storage building the newspaper describes [@ev-0041, p. 42], the Farmer’s Co-Op’s storage [@ev-0041, p. 73], or the marker’s warehouse [ev-0011] — or all four — is not established by anything held. Four sources use one word and no two of them are demonstrably talking about the same structure.
• The pages themselves. Everything above drawn from the binder is a machine reading of a page scan this expert does not hold: the ninety TIFFs behind it are recorded by reference to a volume that is not mounted [ev-0056]. A hand-lettered map legend and a marginal correction in pencil are exactly the material an OCR transcription is least reliable about, and both carry weight above.
• Anything after 1973. The record stops at the marker. What stands on the ground now is outside this expert’s holdings entirely.