Meeks Mortuary oldest business in Muncie; history of other large businesses includes Hemingray

[Newspaper]

Publication: The Muncie Evening Press

Muncie, IN, United States
vol. 63, no. 118, p. 2 Sect. E, p. 2 Sect. G, p. 6 Sect. G, col. 1,6,1

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Meeks and Sons, Established 111 Years Ago,

Is Probably the City's Oldest Firm

 

By EVAN OWENS

 

In this 50th anniversary edition the Muncie Evening Press must take a deep bow to M. L. Meeks & Sons, which celebrated its 100th anniversary 11 years ago and is very likely the oldest firm in the city.

In fact, there were dozens of firms that were already thriving when The Press came on the scene. A few, not many, are in the same location now they were then, and in some, ownership has gone down through the fam­ily to the third and even the fourth generation.

At least two have survived dis­astrous fires to come back strong­er than before.

BUT THIS SURVEY uncovered none that could boast the longev­ity of the Meeks Mortuary, which was established when this was still called Munseytown and some people still referred to White River as the Wapahani.

The history of some of those firms will be given in the ac­counts that follow.

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Kimble Glass Co.

 

In the past 50 years Muncie has seen its glass industry grow to new and important stature as plants like that of the Kimble Glass Co. pour forth imaginative new products for world markets. The wide variety of articles that this particular plant has manufactured during 107 years of operation attest to the unusual versatility of glass as a material and the ingenuity and inventive­ness of the individual glass worker.

From the time it was founded as the Hemingray Co. by Robert Hemingray in 1848 it has been one of the principal suppliers to the field of communications. As the nation pushed west to new frontiers and telegraph replaced the pony express a demand was created for glass insulators on which the wires were strung. Even today the glass insulator is one of the stable products at the Muncie plant.

After its first 42 years in Cincinnati the Hemingray Co. came to Muncie in 1890. The move was prompted by a combination of floods in Cincinnati and the dis­covery in Muncie of natural gas, a fuel widely used in glass manulacturing.

Kimble’s parent organization, Owens-Illinois Glass Co. pur­chased the Muncie plant in 1933 and two years later located here the facilities for all production of its glass block.

Owens-Illinois introduced glass block to the U.S. market at the 1933 World s Fair in Chicago by constructing a building with 27,000 units of its new product. Originally conceived of as a build­ing material, glass block has been developed through a steady pro­gram of engineering and research into a product with unique day­lighting properties. In sharp con­trast to its first use the temporary headquarters building of the United Nations at Lake Success, N.Y. had 750,000 glass blocks, and is the world’s largest installation.

Since 1933 the Muncie plant has produced approximately 135,000,000 glass blocks, enough to fill 28,000 freight cars. They have been sold in 50 countries in addi­tion to the United States, and have found great popularity in Latin America.

The Muncie plant now makes nine different patterns of block, the newest having a "solar select­ing" feature that enables it to re­ject hot intense sunlight while admitting cooler daylight from the north sky and ground re­flected light.

Another new development, em­ploying similar features of con­trolled daylighting, is a panel of glass block prefabricated in an aluminum grid frame, called "Toplite," designed for installa­tion in flat roofs of homes, schools, commercial and indus­trial buildings. It was developed to solve the problem of daylight­ing dark interior rooms.

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