By Evelyn Ryan
Morgantown Dominion Post
August 23, 2003
The Monongahela River may snake from Fairmont to Pittsburgh, but it has a woeful lack of public access in Monongalia County.
The only places boats can put in are at Uffington, the foot of Walnut Street in Morgantown, and Star City's Riverfront Park.
The Monongalia County Commission is gambling $100 that it can serve as the midwife for the creation of a fourth location, at the bottom of Van Voorhis Road in the tiny community of Van Voorhis.
The $100 is a one-year option on about 5 acres that housed the now defunct Quality Glass Co. manufacturivng plant. The land, Commissioner Bob Bell said, fronts on the river and would be a prime spot for a boat dock, put-in and parking area.
The gamble is whether the county can snare some of the highly sought-after brownfields hazardous waste cleanup money the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be handing out later this year.
"We know its contaminated," Bell said. "We know there's liability issues there. But in the long term, there's 3 acres that could be cemented over, environmentally cleaned-up, turned into a parking area with boat ramps."
Old glass plants are contaminated sites because early manufacturing used lead, and many of the chemicals used in making glass are toxic, as area residents discovered when the EPA used Superfund money for an emergency cleanup at the old Beaumont Glass factory in Morgantown several years ago.
John Lynch of Davis-Lynch Glass, a Quality Glass shareholder, is acting as agent for all the shareholders, who would like to see something done with the site.
They tried to give the site to the town of Star City, but "the problem of (the site) being out of their corporate limits created a hurdle we had trouble getting past," Lynch admitted.
Bell said he hopes the county can get money to clean up the site, find a way for Star City to annex the area, then give it to Star City to operate.
The key is to get funded as part of EPA's Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative to assess and clean up the site. EPA defines a brownfield as a site, or portion thereof, that has actual or perceived contamination and an active potential for redevelopment or reuse.
Helping the county with its application will be the National Institute for Chemical Studies in Charleston. The nonprofit has contracted with the state Department of Environmental Protection to help communities go after these grants, said Mark Scott, its president.
This is the third round of EPA funding for community brownfield work, he said. "It's very competitive nationally. There's not enough money to meet the needs."
The Quality Glass plant started in 1931 and closed in 1989, said Keith Osbourne, who worked at the plant with his father. The plant made glass on a regular basis until the late 1970s, when foreign competition began driving domestic plants out of business. Work became spotty in the 1980s, and it closed in 1989.
Workers there made "incandescent glass, opalescent globes and shades," Osbourne said, the kind of glass used in ceiling lights in those times.
"They had a hard time starting through the Depression," he said, "but when the war (World War II) came they made a lot of shades for the military to put into barracks."
Workers also made the globes for the Perfect Light Company of Cleveland. At the height of production, in the 1940s and 1950s, about 50 people worked there.
In the 1960s, he said, things "kind of slowed down a little bit. The kind of glass we manufactured was not much in demand."
But makers of lamp glass, like nearby Davis-Lynch in Star City, saw their orders climb. When Davis-Lynch had more orders than it could handle, Quality Glass did the surplus, he said.
"I guess you could say they kept us going from about 1965 until the late `70s, when it kind of fell off again," Osbourne said. From about 1980, until the plant shut down, "we just struggled," he added. "We would work a week or two, then be laid off a couple of weeks."
Lynch said he believes his father, the late Emmett Lynch, began his glass career as a youth carrying glass at Quality Glass in the early 1930s.
"I have the support of all the shareholders," Lynch said. "We're trying to make something useful out of the property that's now vacant. We would like to see something positive happen to it."
Bell said the county has an extra incentive to doing all it can with the site. The state Division of Natural Resources would like to spend $100,000 on boat ramps on the Mon River, he said, and Van Voorhis is the perfect place for it.