Star City: A Glass Town Built for Immigrant Workers

In the early nineteen hundreds, the Star Glass Company set up operations in the Morgantown area of West Virginia, attracted by local natural gas and river access. By nineteen oh seven, a company town stood next to the factory to house its workers, and it took the name Star City from the enterprise that created it. The town was incorporated on May seventeenth, nineteen oh seven.

The factory specialized in lamp chimneys. Workers came from across West Virginia, the United States, and from Belgium, drawn by the promise of steady wages in an industry that required skilled hands. Polish and Slovak glassworkers settled there too, and by nineteen ten the Socialist Party had a local branch that within a year won four of five seats on the city council.

The first municipal election was held in nineteen oh seven. By the census of nineteen twenty, the population had reached more than eight hundred. The glass companies eventually closed or relocated, and Star City grew into a small residential community adjacent to Morgantown.

Today it sits on the edge of West Virginia University's orbit, its origins as a purpose-built industrial town largely forgotten. Records show up to thirteen glass factories operating in town at once. A ferry carried people across the Monongahela River until the first Star City Bridge opened in nineteen fifty-one, and today only one glass shop, Davis-Lynch Glass, still makes hand-decorated lamps and parts.