The Glass Story
One coffee company. One glasshouse. A decade of jars, a receivership, an antitrust suit, and three successive owners — this is the supply chain behind every Crystalvac jar in the H and H collection.
Three Rivers Glass Company of Three Rivers, Texas opened in 1922 to supply the Texas and Mexican beverage trade. By June 1932 it had taken H and H’s order for 250,000 Crystalvac jars — the first vacuum-packed glass coffee retail program in Texas. The same year Three Rivers entered receivership, but the jars kept coming.
Ball Brothers Glass absorbed the plant in December 1936 for $130,000. Owens-Illinois followed as supplier through the 1940s — the diamond-oval-I base marks on the project’s clear Crystalvac jars date from this era. Meanwhile, former Three Rivers shareholders Charles R. Tips, W. L. Moody III, and Harry R. Rogers filed a $1.35 million antitrust suit in January 1946, claiming Hartford-Empire’s glass-machinery patent pool had killed the plant — a corner of the same United States v. Hartford-Empire case the Supreme Court decided in 1945.
The jars in the collection are a physical record of that chain: mold numbers, base marks, and lid tolerances trace each specimen back to a specific plant and a specific year of production.