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Beaumont Company History

BEAUMONT COMPANY, Morgantown, West Virginia (1918‑1991.) This company was originally founded in 1905 as the Union Stopper Company, manufacturers of stoppers for non‑refillable bottles, pressed glass tableware and barware. The general manager was Percy Beaumont. He had previously been associated with a glass decorating firm originally located in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, that later moved to Grafton, West Virginia, which was known as the Beaumont Glass Company. (Upon Percy Beaumont's departure, this company changed its name to the Tygart Valley Glass Company.) When the Union Stopper Company was reorganized in 1918, it was renamed the Beaumont Company.

During the 1920s, Beaumont continued to make tableware and novelties, specializing in unusual colors and decorations. By later in the 1930s, however, they seem to have turned increasingly to lighting and stationers' glassware, lenses and signal glasses, chemical glassware, and the like. As late as the 1950s they still advertised themselves as manufacturers of novelties, including decorated vases. A 1954 catalog also offered a full line of Georgian pattern tumblers.

The company was purchased by Michael Carlow in 1988, at which time Beaumont was considered one of the finest manufacturers of handblown lighting goods. Carlow, who also owned the L. E. Smith Glass Company and several other businesses, was later convicted in an elaborate check-kiting scheme. The Beaumont Company closed in December 1991, one of his early victims. ? Adapted from The Glass Candlestick Book, volume 1, by Tom Felt, Rich & Elaine Stoer (reprinted with permission)

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Date:	28.04.2007 22:55
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Added by:	Tom Felt