The Historical Glass Museum in Redlands California is a jewel box filled with a uniquely American invention: pressed glass. The technique of pressing glass in a mold for mass production of goods was invented in the United States in the 1820s.
By the end of the century, glass factories dotted the country creating useful and beautiful objects in a rainbow of colors. Glass colors in the 19th century depended on minerals that were added to the glass as well as the temperature the glass was heated to in the kiln. One of those additions was uranium, which created beautiful but lightly radioactive glassware that glows under ultraviolet light. You can borrow a blacklight from the docents and go on a "glowy-glass" scavenger hunt. (Look for the corn vase, it is really spectacular.)
This museum has collections from every era of American glass manufacturing. There is cut glass made to mimic crystal, pressed glass, carnival glass, art glass, kitchenware, and even mid-century giftware with its bold colors and sleek lines.
The museum started as a passion project of Dixie Huckabee, who founded the Historical Glass Museum Foundation in 1976. Many glass factories had gone out of business by this time, making American glass and increasingly less well-known art form. The foundation purchased the 1903 Victorian house in part because of its many large windows, which provide the proper light for glass displays.
Lots of work went into restoring the home and getting it ready to be a museum. It opened to the public in 1985 and for almost 40 years has been preserving an era in American manufacturing where beauty, form, function, and affordability were one.
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