Black Glassmakers - People and Places
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Title
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Black Glassmakers - People and Places
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Home Location
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Alexandria, Virginia
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Notes
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Black glassmakers in Alexandria, Virginia (Early 1900s) Alexandria, Virginia
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Alexandria, Virginia, became a hub of glassmaking and was home to four major factories, including Belle Pre Bottle, Virginia Glass, Alexandria Glass, and Old Dominion Glass. Black workers were a vital part of this industry, bringing skill, endurance, and expertise to some of the most physically demanding work on the factory floor.
The Old Dominion Glass Company, which opened in 1901, became one of the largest employers in the city. Black glassmakers helped keep these factories running around the clock, handling the intense heat of the furnaces, moving molten glass, and managing the precise, dangerous work of production that required both strength and practiced knowledge.
Photographs taken by documentary photographer Lewis Hine in June 1911 captured Black workers on the factory floor, a rare visual record of their presence and contribution at a time when Black labor was often rendered invisible in the historical archive. Their work sustained an industry that supplied bottles and glassware throughout the region, yet their names and individual stories remain largely unrecorded, a gap this site and ongoing research continues to work to fill.
