Antique L.G. Wright Glass

It is said that Lawrence "Si" Wright had a very good eye for glassware that would sell, and it was this skill that was the basis for the foundation of L.G. Wright in 1937. From day one, Wright did a good business by hiring other glass manufacturers—from Cambridge to Viking—to produce pattern glass for his company using molds purchased from the likes of Northwood and Dugan. Naturally, this created a certain amount of confusion years later, when collectors of vintage glassware and American art glass struggled to differentiate a piece of Dugan or Northwood glass from one produced by, say, Westmoreland, for L.G. Wright. Adding insult to injury, in 1999, a year after L.G. Wright closed its doors, some 700 molds in its archives were sold to the likes of Fenton and Mosser, as well as firms whose business model was to reproduce old patterns and leave their products unmarked. Some of the hundreds of patterns produced by third-party glass manufacturers for L.G. Wright included Daisy and Button, which was pressed into plates, bowls, ashtrays, butter dishes and covers, toothpick holders, and an array of novelty items, from glass slippers to glass fans, in blue, red, amber, and green. Moon and Stars was another prolific pattern, with individual molds for vases, lamps, candlesticks, tumblers, cruets, pickle trays, pitchers, and wine glasses, some of which were produced in vibrant Vaseline. Naturally, carnival glass also figured prominently in L.G. Wright's product catalogs, as did an entire barnyard of animals, which sat on bases to form small candy dishes. These included hens and owls, cats and dogs, frogs and turtles, and rabbits and squirrels, the latter poised atop glass acorns.