Vintage L.E. Smith Glass

Though the L.E. Smith Glass Company was founded by "Lew" Smith in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, in 1907, the company is better known for the glassware it produced from 1910 to 1921 at its factory in nearby Mount Pleasant. There, L.E. Smith manufactured mustard jars (along with the mustard that filled them), fruit jars, jelly jars, and headlights for Henry Ford's Model T, among many other products. By 1920, Smith, whose namesake founder had left the company in 1911, had purchased a new factory in Greensburg, which is a bit closer to Jeannette than Mount Pleasant. It was in Greensburg that the company made a range of milk glass pieces, from figural animals to vases and planters. L.E. Smith was also known for its small novelty glass items, from tiny pianos and pistols to diminutive telephones, many of which were sold as containers for candy. Other mainstays of the Smith catalog during these years were lamps, both oil and electric, whose pressed-glass shades and bodies were manufactured in a range of colors. Smith even made electric lamps in the shapes of sailboats, melding novelty with utility. In the 1960s, Smith re-issued a number of its own prewar lamps, and by 1971 it had finally jumped on the carnival-glass bandwagon that had begun in 1907 by Fenton and in 1908 by Northwood. The first pieces of L.E. Smith carnival glass were actually commemorative plates bearing the profiles of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. Plates honoring Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, a nod, presumably, to customers living in the former confederate states, followed, as did the plate showing the back of a Morgan silver dollar. More recently, in 1979, Smith licensed the use of one of its molds to a company called Cherished Glass Wares. Produced by Smith for CGW, the mold created the shape of a horse/vase, which had originally been sold under the product name "Carol's Sure Win." Today, vintage-glass collectors can find the horse in either amber, blue, or amberina, with a heart and the letters CGW on its base.