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Hemingray glass company top 6 facts
The Hemingray Glass Company was an American glass manufacturing company. The company was founded by Robert Hemingray and Ralph Gray in 1848. In its early years the company went through numerous and frequent name changes, including Gray & Hemingray; Gray, Hemingray & Bros.; Gray, Hemingray & Brother; Hemingray Bros. & Company and R. Hemingray & Company before incorporating into the Hemingray Glass Company, Inc in 1870. The Hemingray company had factories in Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky with main production in Muncie, Indiana. Though Hemingray was best known for its telegraph insulators, the company produced many other glass items including bottles, fruit jars, pressed glass dishes, tumblers, battery jars, fishbowls, lantern globes, and oil lamps. In 1933, the company was sold to the Owens-Illinois Glass Company but production remained in Muncie under the Hemingray name.
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The main plant in Muncie shut down in 1966 and insulator production ceased. The complex is now the used by Gerdau Ameristeel, a steel production company headquartered in Brazil.
Insulators
Hemingray was best known for producing telegraph insulators. To give an overview of the large variety of styles produced, the following table contains the twenty most common. There are two numbers given in this table: the Consolidated Design (CD) number and the style number. The CD number is from a classification system developed by collectors that refers to the shape of the insulator and is completely independent from the Hemingray Glass Company. However the style number (or name) was assigned by Hemingray to each insulator. Due to slight modifications in design over years of production single styles can span multiple CD numbers.