| Left the Plaza Motel around 7:30 A.M. and met Bob at his house, where we wet off to Muncie, IN. Stopped on the way to see the alleged remains of K.C.G.W. plant, now a scrap & body shop. Found a few shards of jars around the perimeter of the fence. Probably left from when the company after K.C.G.W. (name unknown) took over.
Arriving at Muncie, we stopped and ate at the Bob Evans Restaurant. From there we drove to Robert Hemingray's house, currently under remodeling. From there we arrived at the Hemingray Glass Co. factory site. We parked the vehicles in back by the old church in the back of the site, and Bob took us on a tour of the grounds (that we could access). Apparently the buildings are now used as storehouses for old vehicle batteries, possibly for recycling. We were able to view the inside of the building that houses "B" furnace, but the "A" furnace building was secure. We saw the inside of the sand tower and I thought briefly of climbing it, but decided that probably wasn't a good idea.
From there we walked back to the open lot out near oil tanks Nos. 11 and 12. I observed the valve houses of each of the oil tanks, and discovered the metal tag labels still attached to the piping, which I "liberated." (The tag styles are identical to the ones Bob "liberated" from the "B" furnace.) We began digging out in front of oil tank No.12 where he thought he had left off the last time he was there. We dug down a good two feet and stopped, moving over five feet or so towards oil tank No. 11, where we started a new hole. This is where he had left off last time, as evident by the amount of bricks we hit. We found shards of bottles and an occasional Hemi-42 shard. We returned to the original hole and continued, where we began hitting chunks of golden amber glass with an occasional piece of a CD 162 Hemi-19 with color to match.
We took a break and drove to a store to get drinks, then drove to "Off Broadway Antiques" where we antiqued. We returned to the plant and continued that hole, which yielded a few surprises: the bottom of a champagne glass with a matching mold to Bob's (which he kept), the bottom portion of a "Big Boy" bottle, which confirmed Bob's theory of Hemingray producing them (which he kept also), and a whole bottle! He let me keep the bottle, embossed "Fidelio Brewery, New York." I found a few more pieces of amber signals, and aqua glass chunks.
We covered up the holes at the end of the day, and he went to go pick up two glass blocks I had found in the pump room out next to Furnace "B". They were gone. Not a nice note to end the visit on. Either Sandi, the over-protective owner, or one of her henchmen took them. Bob learned that sometime in the near future they will be holding an auction to demolish oil tanks 11 & 12 and Furnace "B", so both Bob and I alike are glad we took those pipe tags when we did. I consider myself very fortunate to have visited and dug at the Muncie plant. The way things look, the area may not be accessible in the near future.
[Note: Later on during the trip, in an antique shop in St. James, MO, I found a Universal Home Bottle embossed "Uuiversal" for $4.00! Definitely my find of the trip. It is one of two currently known; Bob has the other one. If Bob hadn't pointed his out to me, I probably wouldn't have recognized it later on! Then again, if I hadn't gone on the trip to visit Bob, I wouldn't have even stopped at that antique shop at all! Both are scary thoughts!] |
