J. Hoare & Co.

Dates

• Existence: 1868 (date of establishment) - 1920 (date of dissolution) - 1920

Biography

The son of a glass cutter, John Hoare was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1822. He immigrated with his family to the United States in 1853, and in 1855 he purchased the glass cutting shop of the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company. He named the shop Hoare & Dailey. The Houghton family bought the bankrupt Brooklyn Flint Glass Company in 1864, moved the business to Corning, New York, in 1868, and persuaded Hoare to open a branch shop there. Hoare moved his cutting shop into the Corning Glass Works factory and appointed Thomas G. Hawkes as foreman of the shop in 1870. Hawkes would later establish the cut glass firm T. G. Hawkes & Co. cut glass firm in 1880. By 1875, "Dailey" was dropped from the company name, and it became known as John Hoare, Rich Cut Glassware. Hoare’s firm quickly garnered interest locally and nationally; an exhibition was arranged in Corning to display Hoare glass, and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly ordered glassware for the White House in the early 1870s.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Hoare's firm was one of the largest cut glass companies in the United States, employing up to three hundred people. Products included inkstands, vases, preserve dishes, butter dishes, engraved castor bottles, bar bottles, and much more. Customers included jewelry and department stores from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and Helena, Montana. John Hoare sold the business in 1887 to his son, James Hoare, and George Abbott, a son-in-law of Amory Houghton. They changed the name of the firm to J. Hoare & Co. In the same year, the company successfully produced an electric light radiator made of flint glass, a product that helped diffuse the glare of an ordinary electric light bulb. In 1893, J. Hoare & Co. entered a punch bowl into the Chicago World’s Fair; it took two months to make and weighed seventy pounds. The bowl won several medals for its quality and artistic design.

After John Hoare died in 1896, James Hoare expanded his father’s business, opening auxiliary shops in Corning and Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. By 1915, the market for cut glass was decreasing, and there were only fifty workers employed with the company. The onset of World War I contributed to the final decline of the cut glass industry. J. Hoare & Co. was dissolved in 1920.

Bibliography:

Hakes, Harlo. Landmarks of Steuben County, New York. Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Company, 1896

Sinclaire, Estelle F. and Jane Shadel Spillman. The Complete Cut & Engraved Glass of Corning. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

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