Hemingray Glass Company

The Hemingray Glass Company was an American glass manufacturing company founded by Robert Hemingray and Ralph Gray in Cincinnati in 1848. In its early years, the company went through numerous and frequent name changes, including Gray & Hemingray; Gray, Hemingray & Bros.; Gray, Hemingray & Brother; Hemingray Bros. & Company; and R. Hemingray & Company before incorporating into the Hemingray Glass Company, Inc. in 1870. The Hemingray Glass Company had factories in Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky with main production in Muncie, Indiana. Although Hemingray was best known for its telegraph insulators, the company produced many other glass items including bottles, fruit jars, pressed glass dishes, tumblers, battery jars, fishbowls, lantern globes, and oil lamps. In 1933, the Owens-Illinois Glass Company purchased the company, but the Hemingray name was retained at the production facility in Muncie.

The main plant in Muncie closed in 1972 and the company ceased producing insulators. The complex is now used by Gerdau Ameristeel, a steel production company headquartered in Brazil.

Insulators
Hemingray was best known for producing telegraph and telephone pin insulators used on utility poles. To give an overview of the large variety of styles produced, the following table contains the twenty most common. The table provides two numbers: the Consolidated Design (CD) number and the style number. The CD number is from a classification system developed by collectors that refers to the shape of the insulator, and is independent of the Hemingray Glass Company. However, the style number (or name) was assigned by Hemingray to each insulator. Due to slight modifications in design over years of production, single styles can span multiple CD numbers.