AO Glass in Burlington uses 1880 'apparatus' to press whiskey stoppers and Jenny Lind bowls

Talk about serendipity.

Swedish-born Tove Ohlander and her husband Rich Arentzen, who grew up in Connecticut, started AO Glass on Pine Street in 2007 in a small brick building tucked away behind the much larger, 10,000-square-foot building they moved into in 2016. The couple met in Sweden in 1994 when aspiring glassblower Arentzen traveled there to learn about Swedish glass, among the finest in the world, at the Orrefors (Sweden’s National) School of Glass.

AO Glass moved into its current location at 416 Pine St. after it started getting work for Hubbardton Forge in Castleton and other large light companies, which was the reason the company could afford the bigger space, Ohlander said.

"We wanted to try to use a (glass) press because we knew there were a lot of them existing from glass factories that used to exist," she said.

A glass press works by pouring molten glass into a mold and then bringing down an arm to "squish" the glass into the shape of the mold − the technical term Arentzen used to describe the process. AO Glass needed a glass press because of an order it had received from Whistlepig Whiskey in Shoreham to make glass stoppers for whiskey bottles.

Old 101 comes back to life to press whiskey bottle stoppers and Jenny Lind bowls

Ohlander and Arentzen tracked down an 1880 glass press in a defunct glass factory in West Virginia, looking like a haphazard collection of rusted pipes, wheels and tubes on four spoked steel wheels, with a "101" sign topping off the entire contraption. They like to call it "Old Press."

"We heard this press was available at the same time we got an order from Whistlepig Whiskey," Ohlander said. "They wanted us to make a stopper. In order to make that stopper we needed a press."

In 2018, Ohlander and Arentzen sent two of their 16 employees to West Virginia to check out old 101. The factory in question was no longer operating, but was chock full of equipment leftover from its glory days.

"Sure enough it worked," Ohlander said of Old Press. "When they were there the gentleman who was selling it at the old factory said, 'You need to practice on something when you're going to make those stoppers for Whistlepig, so here is a mold.'"

Arentzen and Ohlander paid $5,000 for the old press, a bargain in Arentzen's estimation.

"To build something like that new would be, I don't know, $60,000," Arentzen said. "It's hard to say. It's a hand press glass apparatus you could see in a museum."

Is that Jenny Lind's name I see on this glass mold?

A month after the press arrived in Burlington and was installed, Ohlander happened to take a look at the mold, for a small custard bowl, which the seller in West Virginia had handed to her employees for "practice." She noticed a name stamped on the surface of the mold: "Jenny Lind."

" I was like, 'That's the Swedish Nightingale, the woman who traveled with P.T. Barnum,'" Ohlander remembers saying. "She is from Sweden and I am from Sweden."

Ohlander found references to Jenny Lind as being the Lady Gaga of her time.

"She had so many irons in the fire," Ohlander said.

Lind was a hugely successful opera singer in Europe and began touring the United States with showman P.T. Barnum in 1850 to great acclaim, "making a fortune for herself and a lasting impression on American culture," AO Glass says on a hand-out card for the Jenny Lind bowl the company makes and sells for $38.

Ohlander said when AO Glass launched the Jenny Lind bowl last year, they had an opera night to celebrate, complete with an opera singer.

"We had a very synergetic opera and Jenny Lind celebration," she said.

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosi@gannett.com. Follow him on X @DanDambrosioVT.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: AO Glass resurrects 19th-century glass press for Jenny Lind bowls