The Crystal City Historical Society, which had been inactive for several months, has sprung back to life and reopened its museum, partly due to teenager Clayton Loughary’s recent interest in the group.
Loughary, a 16-year-old St. Pius X High School student, took a U.S. history class last school year for college credit and was assigned to investigate the significance of a historical place in Missouri and create a 10-minute documentary on his findings. He decided to focus on the history of glass manufacturing in Crystal City.
He said he started his research by joining the Crystal City Works Nine Facebook group and asked for advice about where to begin. The group members recommended he contact the Jefferson County Heritage and Historical Society, and the JCHH members encouraged him to take a look at their collection of the Glass Rays newspapers, which were written by Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. employees and published from 1937 to 1940.
Loughary, who lives in Crystal City, said those newspapers vividly detailed the lives of people who lived in his hometown during that period, providing accounts of everything from the vacations they took to their dogs’ sicknesses.
“It was like Crystal City’s first Facebook,” he said.
Loughary said Glass Rays was instrumental in helping him connect the dots from the American Plate Glass Co. to the Crystal Plate Glass Co. to PPG.
Between the information Loughary got from the JCHH and his many trips to the Festus and Crystal City libraries, it wasn’t long before he had enough information to create a 32-minute film, rather than the minimum 10-minute documentary he had been assigned.
Loughary’s teacher, Melissa Wenker, said he was the only student in the class who went so far above and beyond the assignment requirements.
“Clayton has a lot of personal drive. He was one of the first students to approach me with the idea for his project’s topic, and he truly enjoyed the process,” she said. “From researching his topic, interviewing people from the area or associated with PPG, and putting together the documentary, he consistently kept me updated about what he was discovering or his ideas for the documentary.”
Loughary, an Eagle Scout who plans to study aerospace engineering, said his documentary, titled A Pane into History, may be viewed for free on YouTube at sites.google.com/view/glassplantwiki/home.
Reopening the museum
After Loughary finished his documentary in the fall of 2021, the JCHH encouraged him to contact Crystal City officials about getting involved with the Crystal City Historical Society, which had all but dissolved the previous June when the few remaining members informed the city they no longer could run the museum and turned over the keys to the city.
When Loughary reached out to the city, he was told two other residents – Jack Ginnever and Jessica Hamlin – were interested in reopening the museum, which is 126 Mississippi Ave. next to Crystal City Hall.
Ginnever, the treasurer for CCHS, said he and Hamlin initially were skeptical about Loughary getting involved due to his young age.
“Just the fact that he’s 16 years old, I don’t think people took him very seriously,” Ginnever said. “I think that it was that documentary that kind of opened everybody’s eyes up that he really has done a lot of research and knows quite a bit even though he is only 16 years old.”
Ginnever, Hamlin and Loughary decided they wanted to open the society’s museum to the public on a monthly basis and make it accessible to the public through their website. Previously, the museum had not been open to the public on a regular basis and they did not have a website.
To get the process started, Loughary said he and the other members inventoried all the artifacts at the museum. They took a picture of each item and catalogued them with unique numbers.
Loughary said many items no longer had labels, sometimes making identification tricky, so society members are asking for help to identify people featured in a number of photos displayed in the museum.
What’s on display?
Loughary, the museum’s head docent, said he has been working to re-arrange the museum space to make it more open and create more space for displays.
One of the displays the members have been working on is called “All Our Yesterdays,” which will change monthly and showcase different local artifacts, depending on the theme for that month. Some of their recent themes were Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Graduation.
Like Loughary’s documentary, much of the museum features information about the history of glass manufacturing in Crystal City.
Loughary said the impact of PPG on Crystal City can still be seen today in how tight-knit the community is.
“At PPG, if you were laid off, they tried to reassign you so you wouldn’t be out of work. They let go of as few people as possible,” Loughary said. “There was a theme of close-knitness and connection. And that was the main theme in my documentary: connection.”
Ginnever, who previously was involved with the CCHS starting in 2010, said he has spent a lot of time on digital archiving – scanning photos and collecting audio interviews and videos. He said he used a lot of the artifacts collected by the late Joe Pusateri, who was a local historian and a member of the CCHS, including audio interviews and videos he took.
Ginnever said he has enough information digitally archived to start posting on the website for public view within the next few months.
He said a few of the artifacts may surprise local residents, like information about the former racetrack and fairgrounds that were located in what is now a residential area north of Second Street near Mississippi Avenue.
Hamlin, the CCHS president, said she became interested in the organization after she and her mother saw the Old Town Cemetery and wanted to get more information about who was buried there.
Hamlin also said she is interested in bringing attention to history predating the PPG days, such as the Native American people who once lived there, the French fur trappers who once worked there and the African American history.
She said the CCHS doesn’t have much information about any of these subjects and any information, photos or artifacts that that would shed light on those topics would be welcome at the museum, either for donation or for loan.
“Crystal is such a cute town and it’s got such a cute history I think is worth saving and worth trying to put the information out there,” she said.
How to get involved
Loughary and Hamlin are trying to get more people interested in and involved with the Historical Society and community. They hope to increase the number of visitors to the museum, which is open to the public from noon to 4 p.m. on the first Sunday of each month.
Society members also hope to see more people attend the group’s monthly meetings, which are held at 6 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month at the museum.