Albert Gallatin's Glassworks: First Factory West of the Alleghenies

Half a mile east of this spot, in a valley along Georges Creek in southwestern Pennsylvania, the first glass factory west of the Allegheny Mountains began operating in the late seventeen hundreds. Its founder was Albert Gallatin, a Swiss-born statesman who would go on to serve as Secretary of the Treasury under both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Gallatin recruited skilled German glassworkers, some reportedly trained at the Amelung factory in Maryland, and set them up in what was then the American frontier.

The New Geneva Glass Works produced window glass and bottles for a rapidly expanding western settlement. It did not last many years. Gallatin believed that manufacturing was essential to American economic independence, and this factory was his own practical experiment in that idea, built right on the edge of the known world.