Three States, One Post

It used to be that my blog would be very waterfall centric. I have not lost my love of waterfalls but glass, glass, glass! The eastern United States is a hotbed of studio glass and I'm loving it.

I stopped for a night in Connecticut because it was close to New Bedford Glass Museum. During the Victorian era, New Bedford was known as the “Art Glass Headquarters of the Country”. I walked in the doors of this beautiful mansion thinking this was going to be architecturally wonderful. I found the museum down some steep stairs into the basement. The docent must have been lonely down there because he spent several hours giving me a personal tour. It was a great tour, The museum's collection was quite extensive. I now know many many facts and stories about New Bedford glass.

This machine used a stone to etch glass

Amberina Glass

More Amberina

Burmese Glass

Horrible picture.  This is a small little fountain. 
The glass bulbs would be filled with water and then you would type it over like a hourglass. 
The water would be forced to the top and shoot out the top.  

I thought I would take a couple of days off from looking at glass and headed to a church parking lot. The church opens it's parking lot to campers for a small fee. I decided to parking lot camp because it is located just a couple of miles north of Newport, Rhode Island. During the Gilded Age, Newport was the summer place where the ultra-rich built their 'cottages'. One of the stand-out 'cottages' is the Breakers, built by a Vanderbuilt, which has 48 bedrooms. That gives you an idea of how big they are. The price to tour three of the mansions was $57 which was exorbitant given that I had toured them many years before. I decided that I would just do the Cliff Walk which goes between the mansions and the sea. I could get my daily constitutional in and view the mansions at the same time.

The Breakers

Edward Gorey had an very profortable career designing sets for Broadway and illustrating over 200 book covers for Doubleday and Random House. He had another darker side. He is also know for drawing vaguely unsettling scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings. I know him from the animated intro to Masterpiece Theater. His house museum is located in Sandwich, Massachusetts at the beginning of Cape Cod.

Masterpiece Intro

The Gorey House

Cape Cod - you have to go see the ocean

Not much happening here - but the sun was out!

Of course there was a visit to the Sandwich Glass Museum.  They were more known for doing pressed glass.  I also visited the glass studio of David McDermott andd Yukimi Matsumoto. David spent several hours with me telling me about traditional Scottish glass blowing (different from what most glass blowers are doing today). His garden was full of 'mistake glass', glass that did meet his standards. It was beautiful.

My last stop in Massachusetts was Concord. I had already been to all of the 'Shot Heard Around The World' locations. This time, the only place I went to was to Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House where she wrote “Little Women”. Alcott was buddies with the big three of her time Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. She was a staunch Abolitionist, Women's Rights advocate and was the first woman to register to vote in concord in a school board election in 1879.  

Orchard House