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ARTS-6 DUG · THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S OWN EXHIBIT, READ WHOLE
The banked leg could point to Walkerton's cut glass but could not tell it; the Walkerton Area Historical Society's own exhibit tells it whole, and the maker the checklist asks for is a works, not a man. In February 1910 a committee of three came from a Chicago cut-glass company that employed about forty hands and wanted room for a hundred. On February 8 the town's investigators — George P. Ross and D. W. Place — met in the office of the Walkerton Independent and reported favorably on the Chicago works; the citizens then met in Hudelmyer's opera house, elected Ross president of the meeting and A. D. Swank secretary, and set J. E. Bose, T. H. Dougherty, and D. W. Brubaker to selling Central Cut Glass stock at $100 shares priced at $150. By March about all of it was sold — $3,750 of the $4,500 to $5,000 needed was already in hand. On April 30, 1910, in the rain, the town laid the cornerstone: schoolchildren sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," the Rev. R. R. Rives prayed, Thompson Turner presided, the Rev. G. S. Reedy addressed the crowd, N. W. Ericson, the company's secretary, spoke for the firm, and the building committee — Ross, Place, and Turner — sealed memorials in a copper receptacle in the stone while Will Keck photographed the scene from an interlocking tower. The building that rose was two stories, 30 by 200 feet, 12,000 square feet of fireproof cement block, with fifty cutting frames, a 60-horsepower boiler, a 40-horsepower engine driving dozens of imported cutting wheels, a 10-horsepower dynamo, and a fifty-foot stack; the equipment alone cost more than $5,000. Work was set to begin August 15, 1910 with about fifty skilled cutters and expectation of a hundred and fifty within sixty days; by October forty people were filling orders, and by the Christmas season of 1913 the works ran 106 hands not counting a night force that worked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. The glass went to Pittsburgh exhibitions and out under twenty traveling salesmen; the payroll ran "in the thousands each month," and the town expected, in the Independent's telling, to be known worldwide for its cut glass. The war years thinned the force — a blanks famine in 1911, fuel shortage in 1918, a "light force" through the influenza winter — and on February 19, 1919 the works burned, a fire of unknown origin that gutted the building to its bare walls; the company had sixty-five workers and a large new stock of blanks, and it never rebuilt. The canon, then, is the ware itself: Walkerton cut glass of 1910–1919, made in Factory No. 2 of a Chicago firm by hands whose individual names the record does not keep. The named cutter-designer the checklist would prefer stands as the residue: the society's Omeka collection items, catalogued piece by piece, are the settler for attribution at that fineness, and H. T. Racine — the manager the 1916–17 Polk gazetteer names — is printed as the works' manager of record, a different man from Herman (H. T.) Roseen, the president of the works' last years, and the two near-names are not to be merged.
Principal sources: Walkerton Area Historical Society, "The Story of Walkerton's Central Cut Glass Company (Factory No. 2)," Walkerton Digital Library (Omeka) exhibit, read whole November 2026, itself compiled from the Walkerton Independent via Marilyn Hiatt Sherland, The Walkerton Independent, 1886–1924 (WAHS, 2012), pp. 269–438; Polk's Indiana Gazetteer, 1916–17 (Racine, manager; "Manufactures cut glass and pickles").