A Visit to Three Rivers

While traveling in South Texas, we made a day stop in Three Rivers, the home of the glassworks that made the square H and H Crystalvac line. Michael David Smith’s TEXAS GLASS is what first tied the plant to Hoffmann-Hayman for us. The image below, page 50, is a Charles Arnott photograph of a clear and an amber one-pound square jar, with the type line in the book reading (l—r) clear H & H Coffee, amber H & H Coffee — the same comparison pair that led this trip, so we were not in town to guess at embossings from memory alone.

We walked into the first antique shop in town, The Goodie Box on Highway 72. There was no H and H stock on the floor that day, but we still picked up more regional Three Rivers embossed bottles (HH-BOTTLE-2014-0007, lot) and more copies of the glass reference book (HH-BOOK-2014-0007, lot); the $297.00 Visa-swipe receipt (records/receipts/2014/2014-06-14 The Goodie Box - Three Rivers Bottles.pdf) is the unitemized record of the joint transaction. The original author-direct first copy of Michael David Smith’s TEXAS GLASS (mailed from Austin before this trip) is accessioned separately as HH-BOOK-2014-0006.

The dealer on duty, Denise Salvagno, phoned her friend Debbie Keneson, a collector with a booth in Comfort. Debbie had a Crystalvac on hand — a large, clear H and H three-pound jar — and agreed to keep it for us to pick up at the Comfort Antique Mall the next day so we could pay and take it with us (HH-PACKAGING-2014-0004, picked up 2014-06-15). See the Crystalvac Jar from H and H Coffee post for the jar in hand.