references · updated 2026-09-01
Works This Expert Does Not Hold
confidence: single-source weakest: ev-0042
Register of works cited through intermediaries but not held as admitted evidence, with acquisition priorities
A great many of this expert’s articles say something like “Toulouse recorded the mark without the star” or “Brantley gives 1939.” None of those works is admitted evidence here. Every such statement is a claim about what a source this expert does hold reports them as saying, and this article is the register of that debt.
It exists because the mission asks for an account that knows where the sources fight, what each side rests on, and what evidence would settle it. A citation chain that runs through a single intermediary is a specific and namable weakness, and naming it is more useful than pretending the works were read.
How to read a claim that names one of these
If an article says a work below establishes something, the honest reading is: the Bottle Research Group’s 2019 chapter states that this work says so [ev-0042]. That chapter is careful and cites its sources, and it is also the source documented elsewhere in this expert as having mischaracterized Smith’s text on maker’s marks — which is exactly the failure mode an unchecked citation chain produces.
The register
These are the works cited in the Bottle Research Group’s own reference list for the Three Rivers chapter [@ev-0042, pp. 66-67]. None is held here.
Period trade press — the highest-value gap
| Work | What it would bear on |
|---|---|
| Glass Industry 4(5):100–101, May 1923; 4(9):180–181, September 1923 | The founding period and the mid-1923 stoppage, contemporaneously |
| Manufacturer’s Record 84(1):116a–116b, 5 July 1923 | The same window, from a second trade organ |
| National Glass Budget 35(25):11, 25 October 1919, “New Factory for Louisiana” | Predates the company; bears on the Bastrop plant’s site history |
| American Glass Review Glass Factory Yearbook and Directory, 1935, 1936, 1942 | The flint-and-amber product listings, and the 1942 volume that reports the plant inactive |
These are the most consequential absences in the whole register. Every date and figure this expert draws from the trade directories reaches it through one chapter’s reproduction of them [ev-0042], and the yearbooks are the documents that would let those listings be read directly. The 1942 volume in particular bears on the closure-date dispute, where the sources give four different years.
Collector and marks literature
| Work | What it would bear on |
|---|---|
| Toulouse, Fruit Jars (1969) | The arched “3 RIVERS” Mason jar mark and its design number [@ev-0042; @ev-0043] |
| Toulouse, Bottle Makers and Their Marks (1971) | The no-star THREE RIVERS mark and its “1927 to 1935, rarely used” dating; also the rejected 1947 closure date [@ev-0042; @ev-0043] |
| Giarde, Glass Milk Bottles: Their Makers and Marks (1980) | Both mark forms on milk bottles [ev-0042] |
| Roller, Standard Fruit Jar Reference (1983) | The arched Mason-jar mark [@ev-0042; @ev-0043] |
| Roller, “Three Rivers, TX History Notes” (1997), Dick Roller files | Company chronology; an unpublished file, and the hardest item here to obtain [ev-0042] |
| Creswick, The Fruit Jar Works, Vol. II (1987) | The illustrated Mason jar, and the “3 RIVERS {star} HA” Hazel-Atlas variant behind the mould-transfer inference [@ev-0042; @ev-0043] |
| Brantley, A Collector’s Guide to Ball Jars (1975) | The 1939 closure position, which the Bottle Research Group judges most likely correct [ev-0042] |
| Lockhart, Bottles on the Border (2010) | The El Paso specimen evidence — though six chapters of this corpus are held here [@ev-0044; @ev-0045; @ev-0046; @ev-0047; @ev-0048; @ev-0049] |
Industry history
| Work | What it would bear on |
|---|---|
| Vatter, Small Enterprise and Oligopoly: A Study of the Butter, Flour, Automobile, and Glass Container Industries (1955) | The structural argument — whether an independent glass house could survive the Hartford-Empire licensing system. It is the only work in the register that addresses the why rather than the what [ev-0042]. It is no longer the only thing this expert holds bearing on the mission’s second question: the trial record answers it for this plant directly, from inside Hartford’s own files [ev-0059]. What Vatter would add is the industry-wide frame the trial record cannot give, and an author with no stake in the outcome |
| Lockhart & Hoenig, the 2015 paper on Applied Color Label | The dating of the Owens-Illinois catalogue, and so the window the Crystalvac question sits in [ev-0018]. Not to be confused with the same authors’ 2015 paper on Owens-Illinois logos and plant codes, which this expert does hold [ev-0054] — the reference list names the ACL paper, and it is a different document |
| Davis, Warren E., The Development of the American Glass Industry (Kennikat Press, 1949; reprint 1970) | The industry-wide structural context — how the American glass container industry consolidated through patent control, trade associations, and licensing regimes. What Vatter addresses from the economics side, Davis addresses from the industrial-history side. Neither is held [ev-0065] |
| Ball Corporation, The First Century: A History of the Ball Corporation, 1880-1980 | Ball Brothers’ own corporate account of its acquisitions, including the Texas plant. Would carry Ball’s version of the foreclosure and the year of operation that followed it [ev-0064] |
| Lief, Alfred, A Close Look at Closures: History and Progress (Glass Container Manufacturers Institute, 1965) | The vacuum-closure half of the Crystalvac question — cited in this expert’s bibliography as one of the best closure references |
Primary documents named in admitted research notes
The fifteen research notes admitted in the September 2026 intake (ev-0060 through ev-0074) are reported readings of sources this expert does not hold. The notes are the evidence; the documents below are what was read. Where an article cites a research note for a claim, the honest reading is: an agent-authored note reports this source as saying so, and the source itself is not held.
| Document | What it would bear on |
|---|---|
| San Antonio Express, 10 July 1921, p. 9, “Glass Factory Will Be Built” | The founding announcement — names Finkbeiner (not Warrick) as the original partner, and states two glass factories already existed in Texas. Refutes the “first glass factory” claim at its root [ev-0065] |
| San Antonio Express, 21 February 1922, p. 9, “Three Rivers Glass Company Is Organized” | Identifies Warrick as from Pleasantville, Ohio (not Cleveland); fixes the charter timeline [ev-0065] |
| San Antonio Evening News (“The News”), 5 December 1936, p. 2, “Three Rivers Glass Plant Reorganized” | Names William C. Church and L. L. Bracken; gives the purchase price as $130,000 (against the BRG chapter’s $80,000) [ev-0066] |
| TNEC Hearings Part 2 (76th Cong., 1st sess., GPO 1939), testimony of Arthur T. Safford Jr. and Exhibits 123, 303 | Hartford-Empire retained S. S. Searcy to move against Three Rivers in August 1932; the Glass Container Association’s December 1938 survey marks Three Rivers “Operating” for 1937 and absent by December 1938 [@ev-0067; @ev-0069; @ev-0070] |
| Indianapolis Times, 16 September 1947, p. 15, “Muncie Glass Firm Sued as Monopoly” | Three Rivers Glass itself sued Hartford-Empire, Owens-Illinois, Ball Brothers and George A. Ball in federal court [ev-0070] |
| Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Census of Manufactures, 1939, Vol. III, Texas chapter, Table 11 | One glass-container plant in Texas by the 1939 canvass — the number that brackets the closure date from below [ev-0064] |
| Tips, Charles R., Memoir of the Last Empresario, ed. Richard Hudson and Janis Hudson (Agarita Publishing, 2013), 68 pp., ISBN 9780615821955 | Tips’ own handwritten memoir, published posthumously unedited. The highest-priority single acquisition target in the whole register — it may carry the founding, the machinery, the foreclosure, and the military service from Tips’ own perspective in a form more deliberate than his letters [ev-0060] |
Institutional and archival collections
| Collection | What it would bear on |
|---|---|
| Ball Corporation Collection, Catalog No. 98.37, Minnetrista Museum & Gardens, Muncie, Indiana (year range 1870-1999; indexed for “Three Rivers Glass Company”) | Ball’s acquisition records, subsidiary correspondence, and potential closure documents [ev-0064] |
| RFC loan case files, NARA RG 234 (paid and declined loan case files, 1932-42) | Whether the RFC loan was real, what happened to it, and whether Church’s alleged sabotage is documented from the lender’s side [ev-0067] |
| Live Oak County Clerk deed records, grantor/grantee index 1936-37 | The receiver’s deed naming the court and cause number for the foreclosure [ev-0066] |
| U.S. v. Hartford-Empire Co. compliance file, NARA Chicago, RG 21 (N.D. Ohio, Western Division, Toledo, 1945-55) | Ball’s post-decree reports on selling the Three Rivers property; would date the end of the plant [ev-0069] |
The one that is only partly a gap
Smith’s Texas Glass (1989) appears in the same reference list [ev-0042], and it is the one work there that this expert does hold — in two independent transcriptions of the same book [@ev-0038; @ev-0039]. Being able to check the chapter’s characterization of Smith against Smith is what surfaced the maker’s-marks disagreement at all. That is the general case for closing the gaps below: not that the intermediary is unreliable, but that a chain nobody can check is a chain nobody can correct.
What this register is not
It is not a bibliography of historic-bottle research. The general apparatus of bottle dating and typology is a different subject with its own authorities, and it is outside this expert’s mission except where it identifies, dates, or distinguishes Three Rivers product. Every entry above earns its place by being cited in support of a claim this expert actually makes.
It is also not complete. The first section lists what one chapter’s reference section happens to name [ev-0042]. The sections on primary documents and archival collections list what the fifteen research notes admitted in September 2026 happen to cite [@ev-0060; @ev-0064; @ev-0065; @ev-0066; @ev-0067; @ev-0069; @ev-0070]. Works that bear on the company but that nothing here cites are not in it and would not be found by looking at it.
Priority, if any of this is to be obtained
The Tips memoir first: it is the only document that may carry the founding, the machinery, the foreclosure, and the military service from Tips’ own perspective, and it is in print (ISBN 9780615821955); it was on order as of 25 August 2026 [ev-0060]. The trade-press items second: they are contemporaneous, they are the primary records behind figures this expert currently takes on trust, and periodicals of this period are the most likely of anything here to be findable. The TNEC hearings and the 1939 Census third: both are in HathiTrust or at census.gov and can be checked from a desk. The Minnetrista Ball collection fourth: it is indexed and accessible by appointment. Vatter 1955 fifth, because nothing else held addresses the structural question the mission’s second half asks. The collector literature last — its content is already reported in reasonable detail by the chapter that cites it, and the marginal gain is confirmation rather than new evidence.