Glass Pickers Gather to Finish Wellsburg, WV, Factory Mural

You didn’t have to be a master artist to pick up a paint brush at the first-ever Brooke Glass Pickers event April 25 in Wellsburg.

Organizers encouraged anyone who was willing to brave the gloomy skies and below-normal temperatures to help them add the finishing touches to a three-panel mural celebrating the city’s glassmaking heritage. Eventually, it will hang at the Yankee Trail head next to the old Brooke Glass Factory site.

The idea, graphic arts major and Wellsburg native Austin Isinghood said, “is just to have the community involved in it.”

“The mural shows the factory, the West Virginia hills, the sunset, whatever,” said Isinghood, who helped design it. “There’s a train going through and a barge — that’s how they used to ship things in and out — and glassblowers showing how they made glass.

“The third panel shows some of the products they made; all three panels are going to be connected.”

The glass factory sat idle for years before being acquired in April 2014 by the Business Development Corporation of the Northern Panhandle, which tasked a new community-based group, the Brooke Glass Grants & Opportunities Team, with gathering input on how the site can best be reused. That process is continuing.

“We had a good crowd, despite the chilly temperature,” said organizer Carrie Staton, redevelopment research and collaborations manager for the Northern WV Brownfields Assistance Center, of the Pickers event. “Probably a dozen kids helped us get a lot of the mural completed, Marvin Six (BDC assistant director) didn’t stop giving tours all afternoon and (we) got some great interviews for the oral history mini-documentary.”

Read full article in The State Journal.