Jarves

house, and organized a new company, a site for
which was purchased at Sandwich, Mass. Here
the Flint Glass Manufactory, incorporated in
1826 as the Boston and Sandwich Glass Com-
pany, started its first run of glass on July 4,
1825, and immediately advertised that the fac-
tory was equipped to turn out apothecary and
chemical supplies, table-ware, chandeliers, and
vase and mantle lamps.

A patent was taken out for the first mechanical
crude-glass pressing-machine on Nov. 4, 1826,
by James Robinson and Henry Whitney of the
Cambridge factory. In 1827 Jarves and one of
his employees at Sandwich improved it and at-
tempted to claim its invention. The courts up-
held Robinson and Whitney, however. This
mechanism revolutionized glass production and
temporarily almost wrecked the European mar-
ket, although pressed glass did not supersede
blown glass in the popular fancy until about fif-
teen years later. Jarves most successfully ex-
perimented with color compounding, improved
furnace construction, used barytes earth in the
mix for a more shimmering grade of metal, and
introduced the secrets of certain colorings from
Europe. He also took out patents for the open-
ing of metal molds, and in 1829, for the making
of glass knobs, but later he could not protect
them. In 1828 he compiled directions for the
building and firing of kilns, and in 1854 he wrote
and privately printed a pamphlet entitled Remi-
niscences of Glass Making, a treatise which was
later enlarged and reprinted. He continued as
manager of the Boston and Sandwich firm until
1858, at which time difficulties arose which
caused his withdrawal and his immediate erec-
tion of the Cape Cod Glass Company on a near-
by plot of ground. His son John was taken into
the new firm. In an attempt to break the Sand-
wich company he introduced a competitive wage
scale, but this only reacted against him, John
Jarves died shortly after the industry got under
way, and the father lost heart in the enterprise.
Deming Jarves died in Boston, Apr. 15, 1869,
and that night his partner, William Kern, stoked
the fires under the furnaces for the last time.
His wife, whom he had married in 1815, was
Anna Smith Stutson. James Jackson Jarves [g.^.]
was their son.

[T. F. McManus, A Century of Glass Manufacture,
1818-1918 (1918); J. D, Weeks, Report on the Manu-
facture of Glass (1883) ; Bangs Burgess, Hist, of
Sandwich Glass (1925) ; F. T. Irwin, The Story of
Sandwich Glass (1926); N. H. Moore, Old Glass, Eu-
ropean and American (1924) ; Rhea Mansfield Knittle,
Early Am. Glass (1927) J Doris Hayes-Cavanaugh,
"Early Glass-making in East Cambridge, Mass.," Old
Time New England, Jan. 1929; Antiques, Apr., Dec.

Jarves

1925, Oct. 1931; Independent Chronicle (Boston), May
29, 1815; Boston Transcript, Apr, 16, 1869-]

R. M. K.

JARVES, JAMES JACKSON (Aug. 20,
i8i8-June 28, 1888), editor of the first news-
paper published in the Hawaiian Islands, author,
critic, and pioneer art collector, was born in
Boston, Mass., the son of Deming Jarves [g.s/.]
of "Sandwich glass" fame and of Anna Smith
(Stutson) Jarves. His youth was spent in Bos-
ton and Sandwich, on Cape Cod, where his fam-
ily had a country home. Although he attended
Chauncy Hall School in Boston this studious,
inquisitive, and sensitive boy's education was
largely acquired by wide reading, and by the
collection and observation of natural objects. At
one time he wished to become a historian, and at
another a physician; however, at the age of fif-
teen he was forced by illness and impaired eye-
sight to abandon his studies. Although his bitter
disappointment at his inability to enter Harvard
College lasted throughout his life, he was of too
adventurous and enthusiastic a spirit to be long
daunted His extensive travels to California,
Mexico, Central America, and the Hawaiian Is-
lands were duly recorded in a number of vol-
umes. In 1840, during his stay in Honolulu, he
founded and became the editor of a weekly news-
paper, the Polynesian, and four years later he
became director of the government press, his
journal becoming the official organ of the Ha-
waiian government. As he was commissioned
to negotiate commercial treaties with the United
States, Great Britain, and France, he returned
home in 1848 and visited Europe a few years
later. He found European, and particularly Ital-
ian, atmosphere so congenial that he settled in
Florence, never wishing to leave it again for any
length of time. He immediately began to set
down his observations and impressions with his
usual meticulous care and eventually published
a dozen volumes, dealing largely with the early
Italian art. As if this were not enough, Jarves
served as United States vice-consul at Florence
from 1880 to 1882. He is said at one time to
have been approached by the presidential candi-
date, James G. Blaine, to see whether he would
accept the post of minister to Italy should the
former be successful at the election.

Jarves began his active collecting, with his
art criticism, early in the fifties. His paintings
formed the largest and most important collection
of early Italian masters which had up to that
time been brought to America, for the Bryan
Collection, which had arrived in 1853 and was
presented to the New York Historical Society
in 1867, contained only about thirty examples.
The reception of his pictures, however, was dis-

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