Hilton Glass Factory Company Houses, Dog Town

photo credit: Rose Marie Dragoone Jordan Collection

These two Dog Town women are Sylvia and Jesse Gifford.

DOG TOWN: A Story from Life Time Resident Bill Daniels

Hilton Avenue is a quite little street that most people don’t know where it’s located. That is until you call it by its other name, Dog Town.

Dog Town history revolves around the Hilton Window Glass Factory. Without the factory Hilton Ave would not be known as Dog Town. Wherever there was a glass plant located there was normally a “Dog Town” near by. The name comes from the workers of the glass plant. Belgiums were great glass workers. And every Belgium owned beagles normally lots of beagles. And thus the areas were the Belgium glass workers lived became known as “Dog Towns”.

The Belgiums along with the majority of the other glass plant workers all lived on Hilton Ave. Most of those workers and their families lived in the company houses or one of the boarding houses. There were eleven company houses and two boarding houses. The workers who lived in the houses paid rent to the company. The rent was ten dollars per home, which was to be paid in the company office, which today serves as Mrs. Gail McBride’s home.

Each of the company houses was numbered and looked exactly like the next one. Mr. Bill Daniels and his family lived in company house number 2, himself and his wife Emily still live in the house today, only making a few minor changes to the exterior.

Mr. Daniel’s father worked as a shift supervisor at the plant up until the time when the plant was sold and closed down. During the early nineteen hundreds you were only taken to the hospital for major emergencies, so most accidents that happened at the plant were doctored in a home. Mr. Daniels’ mother was the person to doctor most of those injuries that took place in the factory.

Mr. Daniels’ was only in his early teens when the factory was closed. But he remembers a lot about how the factory operated from stories that his father told. The factory was able to basically operate on this own, it was almost totally self-sufficient. The only things that were brought in to the factory by train car were the coal for fuel and the sandstone to make the glass. The sandstone was trained in from the cory in Ormsby. The factory made its own fuel from the coal and piped it into the different buildings of the factory.

The Hilton Window Company was a cylinder glass factory. The sandstone and limestone were mixed and heated in the batch house, Then it was formed into huge cylinders about 35 feet tall by 4 feet wide. Those cylinders were then cut in half. Those halves were then heated and put through a flattener. The flat panes of glass were then sent to the cutting room to be cut down to sizes. After each piece of glass was sized it was boxed and sent out on the train. This factory was operational up until the late 1920’s.

Once the factory closed Mr. Daniels’ and his friends used to play in and “on” the factory. The factory had always had night watchmen even after the factory closed. Bill and his friends used to torment the watchmen by playing on the roofs of the different buildings. They would run to one end and holler at the watchmen and by the time the watchmen would get to the end of the building the boys would be on the opposite end of another building hollering. The children also used the large cutting room as a basketball court because of its hard wood floors.

Eventually the factory was sold again to another set of gentlemen. Those men dismantled the factory and sold the steel for money. That dismantling led the area to look like it does today.
Dog Town was a fairly happy and prosperous neighborhood. Which has a rich history from the glass factory.

The Company Houses Today ~ 2008

photo credit: Brittany Gorrell