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The Extraordinary Early, Pressed-Glass Doorknobs of Old South Meeting House
In the winter of 1999, Boston Councilman Jim Kelly was presented with a set of very large, extraordinary pressed-glass doorknobs by a South Boston constituent. Being five inches in diameter, the doorknobs were more than twice the size of regular glass doorknobs of the same period and style. The constituent told Councilman Kelly that he had found the doorknobs in the attic of his deceased father's house (Figure 1). He claimed that they had been taken from Old South Meeting House during its 1911-1914 restoration, and he wanted them to be returned to Old South. Due to their unusual size and shape, these curious doorknobs have since on occasion been fondly referred to as the "Barbells of Old South."
Shortly after, Susan Park, president of Boston Preservation Alliance, contacted me to request that I visit Old South to see these curious doorknobs. Meeting with Emily Curran, the executive director of Old South Meeting House, in June 1999, she asked me if I could shed any light on the mystery of these knobs, and whether I could identify their origin and substantiate the possibility of their past presence at Old South.
Documentation of historic hardware is not an easy task, especially in the case of early glass doorknobs. It is considered that before 1838 about 95 percent of the builders' hardware used in America was still being imported, mostly from its former mother country, England. America's domestic production of builders' hardware started during the 1830s and 1840s in New England, and regretfully, little information exists on those early manufacturers and their products. Companies failed or were absorbed by another manufacturer, and the companies that did endure did not always keep archives of their activities, product designs, and early product catalogs. And, of course, there is the added problem of the 1836 fire at the Patent Office, which destroyed most of the patents on file for the years 1790-1836.
Brief History of Old South
Built in 1729 as a Puritan meeting house, Old South Meeting House is one of Boston's oldest and most significant architectural structures (Figure 2). Benjamin Franklin's family was part of its congregation and had one of the four largest box pews on...