Everyone is familiar with Ball blue jars and with the company’s clear jars. Many have seen green, amber, sun-colored amethyst, and swirled Ball jars. Very few people know, however, that there was once a white Ball jar and even fewer people have seen or own one.

“You can take the lad out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the man,” said the man who loved art, design, movies, dogs, palomino horses, sheep, and rich black soil. W. Edwin Fager was born in 1897 near Fairview, a very small town in Randolph County, Indiana, but spent most of his life working in Chicago or spending time at his farm near Michigan City.

Many of you will remember the Vegematic, made by Ronco and heavily advertised on TV.  The promise was that “It slices, dices, chops and peels, makes thousands of julienne fries in seconds!” Well, to show that there is nothing new under the sun, Muncie had its own version of a similar kitchen specialty back in the early 1920s.

How could such a great, happy photograph come from a morgue? It can when it’s part of a collection of eighty boxes of archival material donated to Minnetrista in 2004 from Ball Memorial Hospital—now IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital. Hundreds of photographs, brochures, annual reports, and other papers documenting the hospital from its beginnings in the 1920s had been squirreled away in the unused morgue in the older building.

Last month I shared the story of my trip to Columbia, Missouri, to meet Louesa Danks and see her collection of Meeks furniture. Several years after this visit, Louesa’s friend, Jeanne, called to tell me that it was time to pick up the furniture. Louesa was selling her house and moving to a retirement home. I found a professional furniture mover from St. Louis with experience in moving antiques, recruited two Minnetrista men—Jon Gray and Dick Cole—to accompany me and headed for Columbia.

In 1998, I got a telephone call from Louesa Danks, granddaughter of James Meeks of The Meeks Mortuary family. When I heard that she was interested in donating a large collection of Meeks furniture, then registrar Heather Davis and I immediately booked our flight to Columbia, Missouri. Within a few days of the telephone call, Heather and I drove to Indianapolis and boarded a flight to St. Louis.

Look at the children in the front row of this group of glass workers. How old do you think they are? Eight or nine years old, maybe? While we would be horrified now to think of young children working in a glass factory—or any place, for that matter—it was common fewer than one hundred years ago. These children worked in the same blistering hot conditions as adults and held numerous jobs in the making of various kinds of glass; including carrying the products from the glass blower to the finisher to the cooling oven. All of this was done for very low pay.

Every now and then an object of mysterious function comes into the Minnetrista Heritage Collection. Often, the donor doesn’t know what it is, but just that they “found it when I cleaned out grandma’s basement.” We look through our reference books and search on-line. It is hard, however, to Google something when you have no idea at all what it is.

If you look very, very closely when Dorothy encounters the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, you’ll see a green straw bonnet on one of the Munchkin ladies. Well, maybe you won’t. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure that the next time I watch the movie (or the next or the next) that I will see it. It’s a lovely hat—light green with a wide brim and tall crown, trimmed with striped satin ribbon, a spray of flowers, and a plume. The lady who wore it must have been quite important and prominent in Munchkinland.

Natural gas was discovered in East Central Indiana in the late 1800s. Availability of cheap, abundant fuel attracted more than 150 glass manufacturers to this area. The gas soon dwindled to almost nothing and most of the manufacturers sold out, moved, or closed.

Several years ago, Minnetrista’s former curator of business and industrial history, Dick Cole, asked me if I knew what made a Mason jar a Mason jar. He was thoroughly surprised when I was able to tell him, because he knew that my main interest in our large collection of jars is the stories that they can tell. I am not an expert on closures and markings, although I’ve certainly learned a lot in my time at Minnetrista. I also know that I can call on Dick to answer my questions, because he loves to share his knowledge of fruit jars. Anyway, read on and you’ll know why Mason jars are fruit jars, but not all fruit jars are Mason jars.

Before the discovery of the Trenton Gas Field in the late 19th century, East Central Indiana was almost exclusively an agricultural area. The Gas Boom became a defining moment in the development of the region. Natural gas had an enormous impact on the history, culture, and life of the region and produced a period of economic growth, marked by a dramatic surge in the number of energy-dependent industries that took advantage of the relatively cheap source of fuel to build new factories in the area. Principal among these industries was the manufacturing of glass.