Digging at Hemingray
25 Years Later By
Roger O. Lucas
What started out to be a year or two search for insulators, turned out to be a quarter-century odyssey. As most of you know, the Hemingray Glass Co. made various articles of glass. My favorite group of objects went from insulators to oil lamps during these 25-years. Who knew that Hemingray was capable of making such delicate and beautiful glass like oil lamps, shades, syrup dispensers and tableware.
The riverfront re-development of the Covington, Kentucky Hemingray location brought up shards, that coupled with what we (Darin Cochran, Bob Stahr and myself) found at the Muncie site, has really opened up a whole new Hemingray world well beyond the insulators, water bottles and H.G. CO marked items that have been known for years.
But rather than repeating stories about earlier digs, I would like make a couple of other points about the Muncie site of Hemingray. In 2016, during the NIA National Show tours of the Hemingray plant, I told each group about the possibility of the “A” Building being torn a contractor willing to take down the building for the scrap metal. The owner had issues with the previous contractor over removal of the “B” furnace building years before. That contractor did the work when steel was at a higher value for scrap. Not only was there steel cut through the thick steel “skin” of the tower. There’s a lot less steel remaining in the “A” building, plus a reworking of the roof connections would need to be done.
Darin and I will be privileged, I hope, to disconnect electrical service from the remaining would give us access to the “A” building to take photographs of areas we haven’t seen yet. Plus, we’d get to see if there are old signs, papers, or insulators sitting on I-beams. But I won’t hold my breath.
National, the owner told me they arranged for a cell tower to be built on the back property... beyond any building and next to the old stone access drive that goes to a substation. This area was a place we dug years before, so I wasn’t too concerned about something new coming up. Darin and I went back one day and found a huge crater with a pile of dirt and railroad ties and rails mixed in. Also, there was a really big machine that dug that really big hole (top of page). Glass was sticking out of the north wall of the hole and we worked on that for a while. But because we had already dug the area, nothing new was found.
50 Crown Jewels
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