Jeanette, Pennsylvania, at the turn of the last century, was proudly referred to as Glass City thanks to the numerous glass manufacturers which started sprouting up after an abundance of natural gas was serendipitously stumbled upon. The impact this glass industry held over the region was of such great import that the town was even named for Jeannette Hartupee McKee, the wife of a local industrialist who founded his own glassworks. Back then successful enterprises – like Jeannette Glass, American-Saint Gobain, Fort Pitt Glass, and Westmoreland Glass, among others – supplied the nation with everything from plate windows and streetlight glass to decorative tableware, providing perhaps as much as 85% of the world’s industrial glass needs. Bustling, thriving, and prosperous, the tight-knit community of Jeannette was a force to be reckoned with.

But that was then.

By the 1970s, Jeannette, like many other small manufacturing towns throughout America, was hard hit by low cost Asian imports that forced a once flourishing industry to virtually vanish, leaving only two companies: St. George Crystal (which at press time closed up shop as well) and Jeannette Specialty Glass (JSG). The latter, remarkably, is a 104-year-old operation. For seven decades, it remained in the hands of its original owners, the Crock family, when it was known as Jeannette Shade and Novelty, specializing in industrial glass production. (Fun fact: the company produced the glass components used in the Walk/Don’t Walk lights found on practically every street corner in America.)

In 1976, the company finally changed hands when it was acquired by Ted Sarniak. Under his aegis, JSG has done an effective job of staying a step ahead of the competition, not bad for a made in the U.S.A. brand operating from the same factory – now 100,000 square feet – for more than a century. Sarniak, as a matter of fact, has become something of a pro at keeping ahead of the growing competition. “In the past 15 years we’ve changed our production line four times,” he proffers. “When the lighting production industry went to Taiwan, we started making pressed glass for specialty manufacturers like Westinghouse. When that business started eroding, we moved into the high-end giftware market.”

And that’s where we come in.

Six years ago when others were fleeing tabletop production Sarniak plunged in. He conceived JSG Oceana whilst on a seaside vacation. The longtime glass veteran (prior to purchasing JSG, he put in a decade at Lenox helping create their first crystal assortments) was captivated by the sparkling and shimmering Atlantic, not all that unlike the glass he worked with for decades. Then and there he resolved to find a way to morph JSG’s industrial glass prowess into functional tabletop art. Much trial and error ensued over the next three years until the industrial engineer developed the cocktail – he calls it Hard Roc Glass – that yielded a durable, scratch-, stain-, and impact-resistant, oven-, dishwasher-, and microwave-safe product, as beautiful as it is strong. Sarniak calls it the Hercules of Glass.

So far the enterprise is showing Herculean possibility. With Sarniak’s wife Kathleen – recruited after 20 years in retail – to head the operation, sales have doubled one year to the next thanks to the new categories of kitchen, bath, and tabletop. Employees have quadrupled to 100, and factory size doubled in 2004. Most importantly, it continues to prove this little company that could continually metamorphosizes to accommodate changing times and climes. “We’re so excited and motivated by this new direction,” Kathleen Sarniak rejoices. “It won’t be long before we’re a major high-end player. We’re privileged to carry on this glassmaking tradition with a proud American heritage.”

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