For the past eighty years, the St. Clair-Rice family has been crafting art glass using techniques passed down through generations.
I remember seeing this St. Clair Glass on the kitchen counters and shelves and window sills of my dad’s side of the family since I was a kid. It comes from the same place they do: Madison County, Indiana.
Of course, the people and the glass have made their way across the country, moving for better jobs or better weather or bigger cities. Our family’s business used to be farming, but, even the relatives that stayed in the region left the farms years ago.
Every so often when I was growing up, my family would make kind of a pilgrimage from our home in Arizona to visit our Indiana family. Sometimes we’d visit the St. Clair glass factory (The House of Glass) in Elwood.
The showroom had shelves and tables stuffed full of lamps and vases, and so many paperweights — palm-sized sculptures shaped like birds, bells, baskets, apples, and angels with a landscape of colorful glass inside their clear exteriors. Each one was made by hand in the on-site workshop.
My parents would buy gifts to bring back for the friend who collected apple things or the one who was dog-sitting while we were away.
You could see new pieces in progress, molten glass glowing from the heat of the furnace as the artist turned it and added color and shaped it into something you could recognize. It was like magic.
And it still was when we visited Madison County a few years ago. The store shelves were more sparse, but through the back door in the sweltering workshop, artist-owner Joe Rice was still firing the glass by hand.
Even then, he was concerned that he hadn’t been able to find an apprentice. Like my great-grandparents’ farm, there wasn’t anyone willing and able to take on the work long term.
As he used a long metal pole to heat up the liquid that would become a teapot-shaped ring holder, Joe Rice (who sometimes signs his work “Joe St. Clair,” using his mother’s maiden name) explained how it wasn’t just that he didn’t have a successor, there were few glass makers out there who could match both their production numbers and commitment to flawless glasswork.
And now there are even fewer.
Joe Rice announced last year he’d be closing up shop at the end of 2018, limiting his work to only select projects.
I still hope that one day soon someone will have the passion to learn his trade and fire up the furnace again.
