Avocado Green Glass Shakers-L.E. Smith Glass Co, circa 1960's

The L.E. Smith Glass Company was a specialty glass maker in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania that had been producing glassware since 1909. The company's customers included Williams-Sonoma and Martha Stewart Living, and their products were featured in catalogs for Bloomingdale's, Spiegel, Restoration Hardware, and Neiman-Marcus.
L.E. Smith "Lewy" purchased a failing glass furnace factory in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, for $8400 on October 30, 1909, and L.E. Smith Glass Co. was born.
Lewis E. Smith became so caught up in glass making processes, that he spent most of his time producing glass kitchenware. As the story goes, Lewis invented the glass percolator top, the first glass mixing bowls, a redesigned reamer, and a “Glass Sanitary Drinking Fountain for Chicks or Fowls.”
Lewis E. Smith moonlighted as a chef, so the factory-made pressed glass jelly tumblers and sealed teacups for Smith to bottle his special mustard recipe. Lewis E. Smith retired from CEO in 1911, and had close friend Charles Wiblere assume control of the factory and furnace. It was "Lewy" Smith himself that started and operated a Mustard Department on the factory floor. The Mustard Department operated from 1910 to 1916, and the plant apparently canned olives for the War Effort during the same period. Like all the other glass companies of the time, L.E. Smith produced colored glass from the late 1920's until the late 1930’s. Known as "depression glass" Smith made glass in a variety of colors including pink, green, yellow, blue, and even hit upon a formula for black glass that set them apart from other manufacturers of the time. By the end of the 1930's, Smith Glass has factories in nearby Jeanette and Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It was the Greensburg factory that in 1955 to 1965 made "milk glass" housewares and drinkware for the company. By 1971, Smith started moving away from the milk and singular colored glass and started getting into the "resurgence wave" of Carnival Glass production.
The 1980's and 1990's saw a decline in glassware due to imported goods, plastic production, and a country drinking more bottled water, so Smith Glass's production declined rapidly, and they closed almost all their factories except the original one in Mt. Pleasant. In early-2004, L.E. Smith Glass Co. ceased all glass production. In mid-2004, the assets of the company, including equipment, the Mt. Pleasant factory and property, machinery, and their glass molds, were all purchased by William A. Kelman a Scottish glassmaker who intended to form a new company called Port Augustus Glass Co. LLC, named after a town in Scotland.
By mid-2005, Kelman was already bankrupt, and in 2010, the original factory building became The Edge Sports Academy of Mt. Pleasant. Finally, L.E. Smith Glass Company's time here was a memory when, in 2018, The Edge Sports Academy went out of business and the building was demolished.
L.E. Smith Glass Co. made mid-century dinnerware items in Avocado green glass in several patterns.
These salt and pepper shakers are in the pattern of the infamous Moon & Stars of Early American Pressed Glass invented by Adams & Company in 1874 (originally called Palace pattern).
Smith made Avocado tinted glassware in the Moon & Stars pattern from the 1940's to early 1970's exclusively in the USA.
Avocado green glass is colored by adding chromium or iron oxides to make darker green tinted glass. The procedure is still widely used today in beer bottle manufacturing.
Each of the two shakers weigh 6.5 ounces each and are 4 inches tall.
Both have the metal sifter caps with one having some surface wear.
No cracks or chips in glass. Base diameters are 1.5"
Picked by MemoryLaneVintiques in Haslet, Texas.
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