Site of Three Rivers Glass Factory
Three Rivers, Live Oak County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Opened 1922 by company headed by Charles R. Tips (b. 1892), the founder of town of Three Rivers. Powered by local natural gas, plant used quartzose sand mined in area to make glass bottles for milk and other beverages and jars for food and cosmetics, attaining annual gross sales of a million dollars. Sold in 1937 to Ball Glass Company, it was closed in 1938, but had shown Texas potential in the industry. In later years, factory site became location of a warehouse. Glass with Three Rivers cipher is highly prized by collectors.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1922 Charles R. Tips, founder of the town of Three Rivers, opened a glass factory that fed on the region's own resources — local natural gas for power and area-mined quartzose sand for raw material — to turn out milk bottles, beverage containers, and jars for food and cosmetics. At its peak it grossed a million dollars a year before being sold to Ball Glass in 1937 and closed the next year. Its short run proved Texas could compete in the industry, and bottles bearing the Three Rivers cipher are now collectors' prizes.
Why it matters
The plant shows how early-twentieth-century Texas towns tried to convert local natural resources into manufacturing, an ambition that quietly reshaped the state's economy.
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Related people
- · Charles R. Tips
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Rialto Theater
Three Rivers, TX
Movies came to Three Rivers first under canvas tents, from 1913 into the mid-1920s, before Beeville theater owners W.S. and J.S. Hall Jr. built a modest movie house by the railroad tracks. In 1948 they replaced it with this streamline moderne theater by noted Dallas architect Jack Corgan, complete with air conditioning and a balcony. Closed in 1981, the Rialto was restored by the city's economic development corporation and reopened in 2001.
Three Rivers
Three Rivers, TX
Founded in March 1913 by Charles R. Tips, this South Texas townsite was first chartered as Hamiltonburg for a local family, with lots going on sale that Fourth of July. The following year the Post Office renamed it Three Rivers to mark the nearby meeting of the Nueces, Atascosa, and Frio rivers. Ranching and farming gave way, over time, to an economy also built on gas, oil, and recreation.
First State Bank Building
Three Rivers, TX
This building housed the First State Bank and the office of C. R. Tips, who founded the city of Three Rivers in 1914. As the town's early financial and business center, it anchored the young community during its founding years in the South Texas brush country. It stands as a tangible link to the man and the moment that put Three Rivers on the map.
Live Oak County Jail
Oakville, TX
Oakville rose beside a Nueces River crossing and served as the seat of Live Oak County from 1856 to 1919, a supply hub for freight wagons and the cattle ranchers who thrived after the Civil War. Joseph Bartlett's 1857 stone courthouse and log jail marked the town as a center of frontier authority, and by 1887 a two-story sandstone Italianate jail—designed by the Diebold Lock and Safe Company of Ohio—held everyone from bar fighters to horse thieves. When the town lost its railroad bid in 1919, the county seat moved to George West, and the jail became one of the last landmarks of the old town.