Welcome
Ian Simmonds is an independent scholar and antiques dealer specializing in the history and interpretation of 19th Century American glass.
Ian also sells to advanced collectors and museums, both privately and at leading shows. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Ian can be contacted at 
Harry Hall White and the 20s
Two rare flasks of brilliant Ohio glass are icons of the '20s - both the 1820s of their manufacture and the 1920s research of Harry Hall White.
Portage County is south of White's home town Cleveland in what was once the Western Reserve of Connecticut. As White scoured the countryside looking for old glass he heard locals talk of Mantua bottles and Kent flasks.
This spurred him to piece together the story of the county's first glassworks at Mantua and its owner's subsequent removal to Franklin, now Kent, which offered a more lucrative location at the falls of the Cuyahoga River.
White's fame in glass circles rests on his archeology of factory sites. He established the use of a sixteen rib mold with distinctive terminal ring in Mantua and a twenty rib mold in Kent, giving these two flasks their strong attributions.
White raised Mantua and Kent to the pantheon of American blown glass. His accounts of archaeology at the Mantua factory site convey the excitement of his 1920s rediscovery of American glass of the 1820s.