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History: Warsaw Cut Glass traces its roots to 1911, when Chicago’s Johnson-Carlson Cut Glass Co. met with the Warsaw Chamber of Commerce to expand the company’s glass-cutting operations. Johnson-Carlson’s Chicago factory could not keep up with demand, and company officers decided Warsaw was a good second location. A year later, Warsaw Cut Glass opened for business in an industrial building constructed of rejected paving bricks from Warsaw’s street department. The company changed hands several times over the decades.
Ownership: Today, the operation is owned by the husband-and-wife team of Randy and Linda Kirkendall. Randy Kirkendall, who has a fine arts degree in silversmithing and furniture design, began glass cutting in 1980 as an apprentice to previous owner Jackson Dobbins.
Product details: The company cuts glass by hand for a variety of products, including stemware, pitchers and tumblers, vases, and art glass.
How it’s made: The company doesn’t make glass but cuts shapes and patterns into glass, one at a time, using large spinning stones at workstations. The stones are put into motion by leather belts overhead, which are connected to a system of spinning wheels and bars near the ceiling.
Fun fact: The company has about 50 standard designs, and combines them as needed, using different shaped wheels. “We’ve probably done every animal on the planet,” Kirkendall says on a YouTube video.
Address: 505 S. Detroit St., Warsaw
Website: warsawcutglass.net
—compiled by John Russell
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