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Glass Etch and Pattern Gallery
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Erickson Company History
| Erickson Company History |
ERICKSON GLASS WORKS, Bremen, Ohio (1943-1961). Founded by Carl Erickson and his brother. Their father had emigrated from Sweden and went to work for the Pairpoint Manufacturing Company. As a teenager, Carl joined his father as an apprentice and spent the next 20 years developing a high level of craftsmanship. Among many other skills, he learned to make pieces with controlled bubbles - a technique often associated with Pairpoint, but also widely used by Erickson in later years in his own glass designs.
In the early 1930s he was employed by Libbey Glass and then, later in the decade, by the Blenko Glass Company, where he was production manager and supervised production of the reproductions made for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Not surprisingly when he started his own factory in Bremen, Ohio, in 1943, he capitalized on his years of experience by specializing in fine free hand blown glass, all from his own designs and under his direct supervision. The vast majority of Erickson pieces are unsigned, those that are signed feature a distinctive cursive Erickson signature.
In addition to the controlled bubble paperweight bases often featured on Erickson pieces, the company also introduced cased bubble glass in 1945 and flame in 1946 ("the startling effect of colored flame, encased between two layers of fine crystal" - Giftwares and Housewares Magazine, December 1950). Other pieces featured cased colors in unusual combinations, craquelle (a lightly crackled finish), and nailsea (a looped effect).
Carl Erickson placed a strong emphasis on quality even with his relatively small staff of approximately two dozen workers at any given time. Erickson was chosen to blow the first pieces of glass at the restored Jamestown glass factory and also made reproductions for a number of museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Old Sturbridge Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Corning Museum of Glass.
Erickson produced and distributed a line of glass designed by Erwin Kalla, known as Raymor Holiday Glass in 1959, but by that time the company was already finding it difficult to compete with glass imported from Europe and Asia. Carl Erickson reached a decision to close the factory in the Summer of 1960 and with the sale of the building in 1961 an era of fine American Art Glass production came to a close.
Erickson references include “Erickson Freehand Glass†by Ramona & Franklin Knower†plus six catalogs that are at times available for sale on line. |
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