Sinclair Glass Company

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This 1952 Sinclair Glass letterhead listed a sales office in Chicago but also noted the plant was in Ceredo.

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Although Pilgrim Glass Corp., which operated from 1948 to 2001,
was the largest and best-known glass company in Ceredo,
 it was by no means the first. Ceredo had a glass factory,
 the Ceredo Glass Works, for a short time just
before the Civil War, circa 1860-61.

Glass returned to Ceredo in 1938 when the Sinclair Glass Co. opened.
The big glass plant occupied 30,000 square feet of factory,
warehouse and office space at Main and High streets.
In its heyday in the 1950s it had 125 employees
 who worked two shifts a day, producing
5 million pieces of glass a year.

Sinclair Glass first occupied a plant building that the Glass Brick Co.
 had built at the foot of West 16th Street in Huntington. Sinclair
moved to Ceredo to take advantage of a nearby gas well.

The company produced a wide variety of items, including lenses
for automobile tail lights, parking lights and turn signal
 lights, lenses for flashlights and railroad lanterns,
 lamps shades, ashtrays and glass novelty items.

In its decorating department, young women busily painted attractive
designs on tableware in many different patterns, colors and styles.

In 1957, Sinclair stopped making hot glass and sold all its manufacturing
equipment to the Canton Glass Co. in Marion, Indiana. Sinclair said
it would continue to operate its decorating department, applying
designs to glass products it purchased from other companies.
 Sinclair also said it planned to seek another industry to
occupy the vacant space in its building.

In 1961, American National Rubber purchased the building and
 moved there from West 17th Street and Virginia Avenue.
Sinclair then leased space in its old building, where
 it continued to operate its decorating department.

In “West Virginia Glass Towns,” his authoritative guide to
the state’s glass industry, author Dean Six writes that
 Sinclair Glass went out of business in 1966.

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Note:  This Article and picture appeared in the Herald-Dispatch Newspaper on Oct. 05, 2020.

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