Three Rivers Glass search

raw · papers · ingested 2026-07-26

Owens-Illinois: Texas presence, plant codes, and Diamond-O-I dating (Lockhart / SHA Bottle Research Group)

Source: https://secure-sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/O-IPlantList.pdf

Sources (SHA Bottle Research Group, Bill Lockhart et al.):

No Owens-Illinois Texas plant before 1944

  • Waco, TX = O-I Plant #15, opened February 22, 1944 — land bought 1940, built 1940–44, chosen for MKT rail access, gas, and post-war regional demand. This is the “large Owens-Illinois factory” that Three Rivers folklore says undercut Texas glasshouses — but it postdates TRG’s 1938 closure by six years. Invoking it as a 1930s rival is anachronistic.
  • No Palestine, TX O-I plant appears in the plant register. (Smith’s 1989 book calls the Palestine plant an O-I plant; the SHA register does not list one — an open discrepancy.)
  • Nearest O-I facility to Texas in the 1930s: Okmulgee, OK, idle after 1932. Active early-1930s plants were in OH/WV/IL/IN/NJ/PA/CA.

But O-I had the national capacity to supply Texas by rail

  • Formed April 17, 1929 (Owens Bottle Co. + Illinois Glass Co.), “the largest individual bottle plant in the world.”
  • 1933 O-I catalog Food Container Division listed “coffee and candy jars” and packer/Mason jars — O-I was cataloging exactly this product by 1933.
  • By the 1936 annual report, eleven factories ran at full capacity; nearly half of output was food/medicine/toiletry containers.
  • So O-I could fill a San Antonio coffee-jar account from a Midwestern plant (e.g. Alton, IL = plant code 7) shipped by rail — which is precisely what the H&H Crystalvac jars’ “7” plant code indicates.

Dating a Diamond-O-I jar

  • The Diamond-Oval-I mark (I inside an oval superimposed on a diamond) was O-I’s 1929–1954 mark. Left number = plant; right digit(s) = year; numerals below = mold.
  • Single-digit year codes = 1930s; from 1940 a dot follows the single digit (0.–5. = 1940–45), and double digits begin in 1946. So an undotted single digit on a Crystalvac jar reads as a 1930s year (6 → 1936, 8 → 1938).
  • Three Rivers, by contrast, never used date codes (Lockhart) — its jars are dated only by mold variant and the 1925–1937 mark span.

The documented TRG→O-I customer-migration pattern (context)

Lockhart’s “Bottles on the Border” documents former Three Rivers customers whose later ware is Owens-Illinois:

  • Union Bottling Works (El Paso): a 7-oz O-I variant (plant 9) 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 TRG plant).
  • El Paso Dr Pepper (Empire Products): the debossed style ran ca. 1930–1949; 1950s El Paso Dr Pepper bottles are explicitly O-I-made (plant 15, date code 52 = 1952). Hoffmann-Hayman / Crystalvac does not appear anywhere in this SHA/BRG corpus — its O-I attribution rests solely on the H&H collector site.