The factory that made Lovell feel like a rising city

In August 1920, Lovell threw a party for the future.

Some 1,500 people came to the new glass factory north of the railroad tracks between Shoshone and Idaho avenues. They ate a barbecue in the warehouse, danced afterward and watched the town celebrate an achievement that would have seemed unlikely only a few years earlier: a working window-glass factory in the Big Horn Basin.

The opening was more than an excuse for a large gathering. It was a declaration of what Lovell believed it was becoming. The town was still young, but it was speaking the language of industry. Its boosters advertised the sugar factory, the glass factory, a brick and tile plant, modern electricity and 2,500 “good American citizens.” The message was intended for people well beyond the Basin: Lovell was no longer merely a farm town. It was a place on the rise, a community ready to make things and send them out into the wider world.

For a time, the glass factory seemed to prove the point.

A big idea takes shape

The Big Horn Glass Company was organized in the spring of 1918, when the country was still at war and the American West was full of talk about new towns, new industries and new opportunities. Its purpose was straightforward and ambitious: to manufacture, sell and distribute glass products.

The company was capitalized at $250,000, a considerable sum for a town of Lovell’s size. Before the first furnace could be fired, its organizers sought the mineral rights and access needed for an enterprise that would require sand, clay, limestone and fuel. They also looked for rights-of-way for pipelines and rail spurs. The planning itself suggested a belief that the factory would not be a short-lived experiment, but a permanent part of Lovell’s future.

Construction and preparation brought work even before glass was made. During the fall of 1919, advertisements sought laborers for eight months at 55 cents an hour and carpenters for four months at 87½ cents an hour. Recruiters went east in search of skilled glass workers. The company sought between 50 and 100 tons of baled straw, an everyday item that mattered to a factory preparing to pack and ship fragile products.

The timing appeared favorable. After World War I, demand for window and plate glass was strong. Dealers around the country struggled to keep up, and Lovell’s backers believed the new plant could eventually turn out a railroad carload of window glass a day. In 1920, representatives traveled to Billings to explain the project to business leaders and invite their support. The factory was promoted as the first of its kind west of Kansas.

That kind of claim carried real weight. In the 1920s, a factory did not simply provide a product. It brought payroll, skilled trades, construction, shipping and a reason for families to put down roots.

Pride with a payroll

When the doors opened, the plant employed about 200 men, nearly all skilled in the craft. At its high point, it employed roughly 300. That number helps explain why the factory held such a large place in Lovell’s memory.

Three hundred jobs meant far more than 300 pay envelopes. It meant hundreds of families renting or building homes, children attending local schools, customers walking into local stores and people filling the churches, streets and public gatherings of a growing town. The factory became an economic engine and a visible source of community pride.

Its workers also made the factory a spectacle. In the evenings before the grand opening, residents gathered to watch glass workers create souvenirs: vases, canes and wall hangings. Some later displays included novelty items in red, white and blue, along with silver and gold-colored pieces. Glass products made in Lovell appeared in regional displays and were shipped to markets in Montana and North Dakota.

At the factory, the work was hot, demanding and highly skilled. A mixture of sand, lime and soda was heated in a tank to around 2,800 degrees, creating molten glass. A gatherer lifted the proper amount on the end of a blowing iron. The blower and snapper shaped it, rotating the glass constantly, before it was formed into a cylinder, split, reheated, flattened, cut and boxed.

It was labor that required teamwork and experience. The blower was among the elite workers in the shop, and the work was not something a man learned in an afternoon. For Lovell, the arrival of trained glass workers, including families from Belgium later in the decade, made the factory feel connected to an international trade that had somehow found a home in northern Wyoming.

The work came in runs and seasons, rather than in one uninterrupted stream. The factory closed at times, changed ownership and was repaired and restarted. Yet the production figures show why its supporters remained hopeful. After an overhaul in 1923 that cost about $50,000, the plant produced 45,000 boxes of window glass during a 16-week run. The payroll for that period totaled $100,000. Workers signed up for the next season, and Lovell’s industrial dream appeared very much alive.

Later operations shipped special orders, including double- and triple-strength glass. As late as 1928, the Lovell operation was described as the only remaining glass plant in the country where window glass was still blown by the breath of men.

That distinction was impressive, but it also revealed the factory’s difficulty.

A hard place to compete

Lovell’s glass makers produced a product that required great skill. They did not fail because the town lacked effort or because its workers did not understand their trade. The larger problem was that glass manufacturing was changing.

Across the country, hand-blown operations were giving way to machine production. Larger factories in bigger cities had better access to transportation, markets and the main railroad lines. Lovell had rail service, but it was not positioned on one of the major routes. Shipping finished glass, a fragile and bulky product, cost more from the Big Horn Basin than it did from factories closer to principal lines and large customers.

That disadvantage was difficult to overcome. The same town that had taken pride in sending its glass outward now faced the cost of every mile between Lovell and the markets where that glass needed to be sold. A plant can make excellent goods and still struggle when the freight bill is too high.

The glass factory’s history is therefore not simply a story of a small town reaching too far. It is a story of a town trying to build industry in a place where the odds were not always in its favor. The workers kept the furnaces going, rebuilt tanks, repaired buildings and tried to preserve a hand-crafted trade as technology and transportation reshaped the business around them.

The fire that ended an era

On April 25, 1928, fire broke out in the factory’s main building. The blaze destroyed the two-story structure, which covered about a half-acre, and ruined its equipment and machinery. The fire was so severe that Lovell lost electric power for several hours after damaged wires caused a short circuit. Despite the work of the volunteer fire department, the building was gone in about 45 minutes.

The loss was estimated at $250,000. Eight thousand pieces of cut glass in the warehouse were spared, but the heart of the factory was not.

The fire gave the story an abrupt and dramatic ending, but the factory’s economic problems had been building before the flames. High shipping costs and growing competition from machine-run plants had made it harder to operate profitably. The Great Depression had not yet begun when the factory burned; Lovell’s glass industry had already been confronting the pressures that would make its future uncertain.

For nearly a decade, the glass factory showed what Lovell believed it could be: a Basin town capable of recruiting skilled workers, operating a complex manufacturing plant and selling its products far beyond Wyoming.

The factory is gone, but the people and the confidence behind it did not disappear. Descendants of the families who believed a glass factory could succeed in the heart of the Big Horn Basin are still here. Through the years, other factories, businesses and industries have taken their place, helping Lovell remain a viable community through changing times.

Will there be another “next big thing” for Lovell? Only time will tell. But the town is still shaped by people willing to see possibilities where others might see distance, and to keep building the kind of community where families want to raise their children.