Interviewers: Sharon Reilly, Curator of Social History, The Manitoba Museum
Nolan Reilly, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg
Interviewee: George Chopping, Whitewood, Sask.
August 2, 2002
Interview transcribed by Peggy Stevenson
My Journey of Discovery at Manitoba Glass Works Factory
I have always loved collecting historical relics, but old bottles became a passion after I met Doris and Peter Unitt from Ontario. In 1972 they wrote a book called Bottles of Canada and in it they had photographs of my collection. I was so excited to see photos from my collection in print in a big book that I felt just like a little boy. The year after the Unitts published their book, they decided to do a price guide for the bottles, so I said I’d help them out and did 28 pages of the guide. That experience made me wonder why a “prairie hillbilly,” like me, couldn’t write his own book. So, I started learning photography and taking my own photos. In 1975, I bought a van. That was a dream come true because I was able to make my photography studio in the back of the van. As a result, I started travelling Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta.
On one of my trips, in 1975, I drove to Beausejour Manitoba to take a photograph of a jug with a wine merchant’s name on it. While I was there, I took the opportunity to stop at the Standard Press and that’s where I met a gentleman by the name of Tony Bonner, an excellent gentleman! He had some bottles up on a shelf, so I asked if they were from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. Tony said they were, but didn’t have the factory’s name on them. He told me that I should go to the Beausejour factory site. I was in a hurry and told him I didn’t have time, but he was very persuasive! He said, if I planned to write a book about the bottles of western Canada I needed to make time, so he closed the Standard Press and drove me down to the factory site. I walked around the old factory site and was absolutely fascinated by the big foundations and piles of glass laying around.
After visiting the factory site, I drove to see the man who owned the merchant’s jug. He wasn’t home and his wife wouldn’t let me photograph the jug without him being there. He wouldn’t be home until around 8pm which meant I had six hours to kill! What was I going to do for six hours? I decided to drive back to the glass factory site, maybe I could dig up a bottle and at least be able to say that I had a bottle from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory! Once I arrived at the site, I started digging near the new factory site (1910). I dug up hundreds of pieces of glass, or shards of glass, all the time hoping to find an old bottle! As I was digging, I remembered that people had said there were no records of what bottles were made here. I began to think about how they made the bottles…they had to preheat the molds and if the blob of glass came off the blow pipe and cooled inside the mold, it would create a solid chunk of glass with some writing on it. A piece like that would prove that that bottle was made here, at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. No sooner had I thought that then, up on my fork came a solid chunk of bottle, two inches tall, with writing on the side of it, Blackwood’s Brewing, Winnipeg, Manitoba!! There was my proof! That bottle was made here! Now, I could chase that solid mold warmer chunk of glass and figure out what the bottle it came from actually looked like, because I knew it was made here! I was thrilled! I dug for awhile longer, finding another few interesting pieces and then went to see the guy with the wine merchant’s jug. I will always be grateful to Tony Bonner for saying I should make the time to go to the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site that day. Let me tell you, I’ve made a lot of time ever since!!
I started working on my own book, Bottles of the Canadian Prairies, by spending a few months living out of my van, in Alberta, photographing bottles, but I always had the urge to go back to the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site, in Beausejour Manitoba! By this time, I had studied the glass pieces I had taken home from the site and had identified a few bottles that had been made there. I knew I would be able to discover many more bottles that were made at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, but I would need to spend a lot of time digging to do so! I returned to my home in Saskatchewan and started working at the IMC, K1 potash mine at Esterhazy. I obtained permission to excavate at the Beausejour factory site from Canada Cement Company and that’s when my passion for digging at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory really began! Every second weekend, after my shift at work, I would drive to the Beausejour site, camp out in my van, and spend the weekend digging for glass pieces. I used an old potato fork to dig with and had a large screen (3’ x 4 ½’) that was on rollers, I’d throw my dirt on the screen to sift it, often finding thousands of pieces of glass, then I’d look for pieces that were the shape of a bottle or had writing on them. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack!
The factory site was large, so I started making maps of where I had found lots of glass. I was able to reuse old transparent blueprint sheets from work and drew my maps on those sheets. I made maps for every year I dug. I dug in some very strange spots! One day, in 1978, I saw a hole that was about five feet deep and was kind of caved down to a point at the bottom. At the time, I wondered why that hole was there, so I began to dig. I dug and dug until the hole was about three feet wide and six feet deep. Suddenly, a little piece of brown appeared on the end of my shovel! What the heck was that?? I thought it looked like poop, and sure enough it was! I realized later that I was digging at the site of the number two outhouse which was about thirty feet from the old factory building. During the factory's years of operation, three outhouses were built for the workers, along with a separate one for the office staff. When I dug a little deeper, I found a layer of glass bottles. I dug the one side of the hole out and was leaning on my shovel having a short break when, suddenly, the walls caved in and covered me up to my belt buckle! Thankfully, I had learned, from digging bottles, that you should have an extra shovel beside the hole and within reach. During the cave in, I noticed a few bottles and pieces of glass go rolling by me. I saw what looked like a sealer roll by. When I reached the spare shovel, I carefully dug around and uncovered a "Success" pint sealer! It was a really hot day, and I was worried that the old sealer might explode in the heat, so I covered it up with my hat and started to dig myself out. An hour and a half later, I was free! Later I dug the other side out. I found over a hundred bottles at the number two outhouse site, including fifty-five whiskey bottles—surprisingly, only two were from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. It's believed glass blowers drank whiskey there and discarded their bottles in the outhouse. The next outhouse I found was the number three outhouse. It was built a long way away from the new factory building. The managers must have realized that the number two outhouse had been too close to the old factory building, making it easy for the workers to slip out and have a little nip of whiskey or whatever! So, they moved the third outhouse farther away. When I dug at the number three outhouse site, I was a little disappointed with what I found! In that hole there were the remains of a cow, a pile of rocks, and twenty-two bottles, none of which were made at the Beausejour Factory. I also found the site of the office outhouse. That was a good dig because I found bottles that were made at this factory. They just disposed of the bottle in the hole because that was the easiest way to get rid of them. I was never able to find the number one outhouse site!
One dig site I nicknamed Aggravation Point!! It was a site down by the oak trees, southeast of the old factory, on the other side of the railroad track. At that site, under two inches of sod, there was a two-inch layer of broken amber coloured glass, thousands and thousands of pieces of it! Apparently, the Manitoba Glass Works Factory made amber bottles for the Blackwoods Company. The year that the company closed, many amber bottles did not get distributed to the company and were disposed of at the glass factory site. Those bottles were handmade, blown in a mold with an applied lip. I needed to find one of those bottles because they were very rare! I dug at Aggravation Point, on and off, for six years, finding thousands and thousands of pieces of amber glass but no complete bottles. Over the years, the dig site became huge, the size of a house or bigger, about sixty feet by thirty feet! One very hot day, while digging, I suddenly saw what appeared to be, the bottom of a bottle. I was so excited and kept carefully digging around it. There was the neck…the base…the bottle was complete!! After six years of digging at Aggravation Point, I had finally found an amber bottle! I dug around the bottle, cleaned it off and took photographs of it. Suddenly, to my surprise, I spied another base! Had I really found two bottles on the same day, after digging for six years? Yes! There, not far from the first bottle I found, lay another complete bottle! This was a wonderful discovery because those bottles were made from two different molds, it was a very rare find indeed! Although I have spent years searching, I have never found any bottles the same as those two!! I talked to some old timers in Beausejour, and they said that as kids they would go out to the factory site where there were hundreds of brown bottles on pallets that never got distributed to Blackwoods Ltd. and they would have fun smashing the bottles into pieces. That could explain why it took me six years of digging, on and off, to find those two rare amber bottles.
When I dug at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site, it was never my dream to find complete bottles but rather to find unfinished bottles or shards and solid chunks of glass with identifying features. I became obsessed! Rain or snow didn’t stop me. I was stubborn and wouldn’t give up! The local people were so nice. They would see me slaving away out there and bring me hot soup and other food. My girlfriend would come with me once in awhile, but she would get bored and go back to the hotel and read. The only thing that could pull me out of that hole was if she fried a steak and waved it under my nose. I loved steak, so I’d climb out long enough to eat, then go right back to digging.
Over six years, I spent 120 days, about ten hours each day, digging and identifying bottles, bottle fragments and various tools made at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. It was a thrill to discover what was made out there. I felt very rewarded when I found treasures and believe me, I found a lot!! I have examined 15,000 pieces of glass and still have another 10,000 to review. I’ve uncovered around three hundred distinct styles of containers; I believe that 260 were produced at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, but by closely studying their imperfections, unfinished necks, or solid sections, I have definite proof that 146 originated from the Manitoba site. The factory made a wide variety of brewery bottles for companies such as E.L. Drewry, Pallister Brothers, Benson Brothers, Wilson’s Brewery, Victoria Springs Brewing Company, and BC Brewery. They made both 25-ounce beer bottles and 12-ounce beer bottles. The Manitoba factory made over three hundred types of containers as well, they were all the same style of bottles, but each had a different mold, so I studied the molds. The factory made, pop bottles, pickle bottles, castor oil bottles, ink bottles, Rawley’s bottles, Regal Sewing machine oil bottles, druggist’s bottles of various sizes and five or six variations of whiskey flasks.
I found more than just treasures of glass at the site, I also found a variety of tools and pieces of tools used at the factory, parts and pieces of the old machines, grates from the first factory, coins and even old shoes! On one dig I found a snap case, which was an important tool used to hold on to the bottom of a bottle while the neck was being finished with a lipping tool. I also found pieces of blowpipes, and bottle cap gaugers. A gauger was a tool used by the packing boys to measure the size and finish of the bottle caps and necks. Many bottles were discarded if the lipping tool gauge didn’t fit properly. The bottles were shipped by the gross, so if too many bottles were discarded, it meant that the glass blowers didn’t get paid as much. I found tongs and holders that were used when rolling the bottles. I found some mold warmers, as well. Each company that ordered bottles from the glass factory, had their own molds. The E.L. Drewery Company had four or five different molds. The molds each had their own distinguishing characteristics. The Blackwoods Company had two different molds, one was a post mold, and the other was a cup mold. I also found a sealer mold warmer at the glass factory site that was used in an automatic bottling machine. I collected all sorts of pieces of glass canes. Glass canes were long rods of glass used for creating decorative patterns and objects or lantern chimneys. They were produced by stretching molten glass, either from a single color or a combination of colors, into long, thin rods. These canes were then cut into pieces or slices to be used in various techniques. One of my most exciting finds was the original brick lined tunnel that was about two and a half feet wide and formed an arch to about three feet high. The inside of the tunnel shimmered as if it was lined with glass. This is where the gas admitted from the compact coal travelled to the melting pots. I knew what I had uncovered had significant historical importance, so I covered it up again and marked and numbered the spot, hoping that someday the professional archaeologists would come and study it.
Nolan Reilly, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg
Interviewee: George Chopping, Whitewood, Sask.
August 2, 2002
Interview transcribed by Peggy Stevenson
My Journey of Discovery at Manitoba Glass Works Factory
I have always loved collecting historical relics, but old bottles became a passion after I met Doris and Peter Unitt from Ontario. In 1972 they wrote a book called Bottles of Canada and in it they had photographs of my collection. I was so excited to see photos from my collection in print in a big book that I felt just like a little boy. The year after the Unitts published their book, they decided to do a price guide for the bottles, so I said I’d help them out and did 28 pages of the guide. That experience made me wonder why a “prairie hillbilly,” like me, couldn’t write his own book. So, I started learning photography and taking my own photos. In 1975, I bought a van. That was a dream come true because I was able to make my photography studio in the back of the van. As a result, I started travelling Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta.
On one of my trips, in 1975, I drove to Beausejour Manitoba to take a photograph of a jug with a wine merchant’s name on it. While I was there, I took the opportunity to stop at the Standard Press and that’s where I met a gentleman by the name of Tony Bonner, an excellent gentleman! He had some bottles up on a shelf, so I asked if they were from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. Tony said they were, but didn’t have the factory’s name on them. He told me that I should go to the Beausejour factory site. I was in a hurry and told him I didn’t have time, but he was very persuasive! He said, if I planned to write a book about the bottles of western Canada I needed to make time, so he closed the Standard Press and drove me down to the factory site. I walked around the old factory site and was absolutely fascinated by the big foundations and piles of glass laying around.
After visiting the factory site, I drove to see the man who owned the merchant’s jug. He wasn’t home and his wife wouldn’t let me photograph the jug without him being there. He wouldn’t be home until around 8pm which meant I had six hours to kill! What was I going to do for six hours? I decided to drive back to the glass factory site, maybe I could dig up a bottle and at least be able to say that I had a bottle from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory! Once I arrived at the site, I started digging near the new factory site (1910). I dug up hundreds of pieces of glass, or shards of glass, all the time hoping to find an old bottle! As I was digging, I remembered that people had said there were no records of what bottles were made here. I began to think about how they made the bottles…they had to preheat the molds and if the blob of glass came off the blow pipe and cooled inside the mold, it would create a solid chunk of glass with some writing on it. A piece like that would prove that that bottle was made here, at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. No sooner had I thought that then, up on my fork came a solid chunk of bottle, two inches tall, with writing on the side of it, Blackwood’s Brewing, Winnipeg, Manitoba!! There was my proof! That bottle was made here! Now, I could chase that solid mold warmer chunk of glass and figure out what the bottle it came from actually looked like, because I knew it was made here! I was thrilled! I dug for awhile longer, finding another few interesting pieces and then went to see the guy with the wine merchant’s jug. I will always be grateful to Tony Bonner for saying I should make the time to go to the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site that day. Let me tell you, I’ve made a lot of time ever since!!
I started working on my own book, Bottles of the Canadian Prairies, by spending a few months living out of my van, in Alberta, photographing bottles, but I always had the urge to go back to the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site, in Beausejour Manitoba! By this time, I had studied the glass pieces I had taken home from the site and had identified a few bottles that had been made there. I knew I would be able to discover many more bottles that were made at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, but I would need to spend a lot of time digging to do so! I returned to my home in Saskatchewan and started working at the IMC, K1 potash mine at Esterhazy. I obtained permission to excavate at the Beausejour factory site from Canada Cement Company and that’s when my passion for digging at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory really began! Every second weekend, after my shift at work, I would drive to the Beausejour site, camp out in my van, and spend the weekend digging for glass pieces. I used an old potato fork to dig with and had a large screen (3’ x 4 ½’) that was on rollers, I’d throw my dirt on the screen to sift it, often finding thousands of pieces of glass, then I’d look for pieces that were the shape of a bottle or had writing on them. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack!
The factory site was large, so I started making maps of where I had found lots of glass. I was able to reuse old transparent blueprint sheets from work and drew my maps on those sheets. I made maps for every year I dug. I dug in some very strange spots! One day, in 1978, I saw a hole that was about five feet deep and was kind of caved down to a point at the bottom. At the time, I wondered why that hole was there, so I began to dig. I dug and dug until the hole was about three feet wide and six feet deep. Suddenly, a little piece of brown appeared on the end of my shovel! What the heck was that?? I thought it looked like poop, and sure enough it was! I realized later that I was digging at the site of the number two outhouse which was about thirty feet from the old factory building. During the factory's years of operation, three outhouses were built for the workers, along with a separate one for the office staff. When I dug a little deeper, I found a layer of glass bottles. I dug the one side of the hole out and was leaning on my shovel having a short break when, suddenly, the walls caved in and covered me up to my belt buckle! Thankfully, I had learned, from digging bottles, that you should have an extra shovel beside the hole and within reach. During the cave in, I noticed a few bottles and pieces of glass go rolling by me. I saw what looked like a sealer roll by. When I reached the spare shovel, I carefully dug around and uncovered a "Success" pint sealer! It was a really hot day, and I was worried that the old sealer might explode in the heat, so I covered it up with my hat and started to dig myself out. An hour and a half later, I was free! Later I dug the other side out. I found over a hundred bottles at the number two outhouse site, including fifty-five whiskey bottles—surprisingly, only two were from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. It's believed glass blowers drank whiskey there and discarded their bottles in the outhouse. The next outhouse I found was the number three outhouse. It was built a long way away from the new factory building. The managers must have realized that the number two outhouse had been too close to the old factory building, making it easy for the workers to slip out and have a little nip of whiskey or whatever! So, they moved the third outhouse farther away. When I dug at the number three outhouse site, I was a little disappointed with what I found! In that hole there were the remains of a cow, a pile of rocks, and twenty-two bottles, none of which were made at the Beausejour Factory. I also found the site of the office outhouse. That was a good dig because I found bottles that were made at this factory. They just disposed of the bottle in the hole because that was the easiest way to get rid of them. I was never able to find the number one outhouse site!
One dig site I nicknamed Aggravation Point!! It was a site down by the oak trees, southeast of the old factory, on the other side of the railroad track. At that site, under two inches of sod, there was a two-inch layer of broken amber coloured glass, thousands and thousands of pieces of it! Apparently, the Manitoba Glass Works Factory made amber bottles for the Blackwoods Company. The year that the company closed, many amber bottles did not get distributed to the company and were disposed of at the glass factory site. Those bottles were handmade, blown in a mold with an applied lip. I needed to find one of those bottles because they were very rare! I dug at Aggravation Point, on and off, for six years, finding thousands and thousands of pieces of amber glass but no complete bottles. Over the years, the dig site became huge, the size of a house or bigger, about sixty feet by thirty feet! One very hot day, while digging, I suddenly saw what appeared to be, the bottom of a bottle. I was so excited and kept carefully digging around it. There was the neck…the base…the bottle was complete!! After six years of digging at Aggravation Point, I had finally found an amber bottle! I dug around the bottle, cleaned it off and took photographs of it. Suddenly, to my surprise, I spied another base! Had I really found two bottles on the same day, after digging for six years? Yes! There, not far from the first bottle I found, lay another complete bottle! This was a wonderful discovery because those bottles were made from two different molds, it was a very rare find indeed! Although I have spent years searching, I have never found any bottles the same as those two!! I talked to some old timers in Beausejour, and they said that as kids they would go out to the factory site where there were hundreds of brown bottles on pallets that never got distributed to Blackwoods Ltd. and they would have fun smashing the bottles into pieces. That could explain why it took me six years of digging, on and off, to find those two rare amber bottles.
When I dug at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory site, it was never my dream to find complete bottles but rather to find unfinished bottles or shards and solid chunks of glass with identifying features. I became obsessed! Rain or snow didn’t stop me. I was stubborn and wouldn’t give up! The local people were so nice. They would see me slaving away out there and bring me hot soup and other food. My girlfriend would come with me once in awhile, but she would get bored and go back to the hotel and read. The only thing that could pull me out of that hole was if she fried a steak and waved it under my nose. I loved steak, so I’d climb out long enough to eat, then go right back to digging.
Over six years, I spent 120 days, about ten hours each day, digging and identifying bottles, bottle fragments and various tools made at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. It was a thrill to discover what was made out there. I felt very rewarded when I found treasures and believe me, I found a lot!! I have examined 15,000 pieces of glass and still have another 10,000 to review. I’ve uncovered around three hundred distinct styles of containers; I believe that 260 were produced at the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, but by closely studying their imperfections, unfinished necks, or solid sections, I have definite proof that 146 originated from the Manitoba site. The factory made a wide variety of brewery bottles for companies such as E.L. Drewry, Pallister Brothers, Benson Brothers, Wilson’s Brewery, Victoria Springs Brewing Company, and BC Brewery. They made both 25-ounce beer bottles and 12-ounce beer bottles. The Manitoba factory made over three hundred types of containers as well, they were all the same style of bottles, but each had a different mold, so I studied the molds. The factory made, pop bottles, pickle bottles, castor oil bottles, ink bottles, Rawley’s bottles, Regal Sewing machine oil bottles, druggist’s bottles of various sizes and five or six variations of whiskey flasks.
I found more than just treasures of glass at the site, I also found a variety of tools and pieces of tools used at the factory, parts and pieces of the old machines, grates from the first factory, coins and even old shoes! On one dig I found a snap case, which was an important tool used to hold on to the bottom of a bottle while the neck was being finished with a lipping tool. I also found pieces of blowpipes, and bottle cap gaugers. A gauger was a tool used by the packing boys to measure the size and finish of the bottle caps and necks. Many bottles were discarded if the lipping tool gauge didn’t fit properly. The bottles were shipped by the gross, so if too many bottles were discarded, it meant that the glass blowers didn’t get paid as much. I found tongs and holders that were used when rolling the bottles. I found some mold warmers, as well. Each company that ordered bottles from the glass factory, had their own molds. The E.L. Drewery Company had four or five different molds. The molds each had their own distinguishing characteristics. The Blackwoods Company had two different molds, one was a post mold, and the other was a cup mold. I also found a sealer mold warmer at the glass factory site that was used in an automatic bottling machine. I collected all sorts of pieces of glass canes. Glass canes were long rods of glass used for creating decorative patterns and objects or lantern chimneys. They were produced by stretching molten glass, either from a single color or a combination of colors, into long, thin rods. These canes were then cut into pieces or slices to be used in various techniques. One of my most exciting finds was the original brick lined tunnel that was about two and a half feet wide and formed an arch to about three feet high. The inside of the tunnel shimmered as if it was lined with glass. This is where the gas admitted from the compact coal travelled to the melting pots. I knew what I had uncovered had significant historical importance, so I covered it up again and marked and numbered the spot, hoping that someday the professional archaeologists would come and study it.
On September17, 1989 one of my dreams came true… the Manitoba Glass Works Factory at Beausejour was designated a provincial Heritage site. I had come to realize, over my years of digging there, the historical significance of the site. The Manitoba Glass Works Factory was the first glass factory in western Canada. It was constructed in 1906 and operated until the summer shut down of 1912, at which time it was purchased by an American company, then resold to the Dominion Glass Works Company, and relocated to Redcliff, Alberta, in response to an offer of free gas and free land. It has been documented that the factory produced 15,000 to 20,000 bottles per week, at its peak, and employed 350 workers. The very early glass made there was beautiful, often made by turning the glass in a mold, a technique which allowed the glass to take on a three-dimensional lacy design. These rare glass bottles and containers are prized by collectors. While I was excavating at the Beausejour site, I went to visit as many collectors as I could find that had dug bottles at the site. I would hound them relentlessly, asking to buy their collections and eventually most of them would give in, and sell their collection to me but they usually wanted to keep the rare early glass pieces.
I think that a natural curiosity to explore and discover exists in all of us. My curiosity and eagerness to discover new things fueled my six-year exploration of the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. During that time, I absorbed all the information I could about the factory and the bottles made there, collected thousands of identifiable pieces of glass, and bottles, as well as tools found at the site. I have thoroughly studied and documented the distinctive features of thousands of glass fragments, tracing many of them back to their original bottles. I've long hoped to publish my research on bottles from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, ensuring there's a historical record that documents my work. I hope you find my research as intriguing as I do.
I think that a natural curiosity to explore and discover exists in all of us. My curiosity and eagerness to discover new things fueled my six-year exploration of the Manitoba Glass Works Factory. During that time, I absorbed all the information I could about the factory and the bottles made there, collected thousands of identifiable pieces of glass, and bottles, as well as tools found at the site. I have thoroughly studied and documented the distinctive features of thousands of glass fragments, tracing many of them back to their original bottles. I've long hoped to publish my research on bottles from the Manitoba Glass Works Factory, ensuring there's a historical record that documents my work. I hope you find my research as intriguing as I do.
Manitoba Glass Works:
Glass bottle expert donates items
by Orest Yakimischak
On the evening of Thursday, April 25, 1991, the Board of Directors of the Manitoba Glass Works met at the site. The purpose of the meeting was the visit of Mr. George Chopping of Whitewood, Saskatchewan. Mr. Chopping had done much research on the Manitoba Glass Works and is acknowledged as an expert on bottles of the Canadian Prairies, and on Beausejour glass factory products in particular.
George Chopping led the group around the walking trails on the site and explained his research and findings at the various locations he had explored during the late 1970’s. Following the walking tour, Mr. Chopping set up an interesting and informative display of photographs and glass bottles which he could verify had been made in Beausejour while the glass factory was in production. He explained each bottle and fragment and answered the many questions of those present. At the conclusion of the evening, he donated the materials he had brought with him to the Board of the Glass Works for display and research purposes. This very generous donation will greatly assist the project now and for years to come.