Charleroi glass plant memories live on

The old Corning glassworks still stands in Charleroi — empty now, but rooted in the borough since Belgian craftsmen first lit its furnaces in 1893.

It survived world wars, the Great Depression, floods and the collapse of the steel industry around it. The factory outlasted nearly everything else in the Mon Valley.

For generations, people believed it would outlast this, too.

Then came April 11, 2025, when the longest-running glass plant in the country fell silent.

A year later, the building remains, but the workers have scattered, the legal fight continues and Charleroi is still trying to understand what happens to a town after the industry that built it disappears.

Silence after the whistle

Every morning, Heather Roberts still sees it.

From the front door of her home on Eighth Street, the former union president can look directly at the sprawling brick factory where nearly every branch of her family worked.

Roberts spent almost 20 years there in production support. Her husband spent 19 years there. Her fatherin- law spent 25. Her mother worked there until her death in 2017. Her aunt, brother-inlaw and sister worked there, too.

“Every day I walk outside and that’s the first thing I see,” Roberts said. “That building is still there every day, and every day it feels like a gut punch.”

At noon, there is still a moment when she listens for the whistle that once blew each day, the sound that set time in the Magic City.

Other times, she waits for the sharp whistle of a press, a sign that something has happened at the plant, only to realize it is a passing barge on the river.

For generations, the whistle rolled through the Valley. Families set their clocks by it. Workers changed shifts by it.

Now there is only silence. “You used to hear the presses. You heard the whistle. You knew when something was going on,” Roberts said. “Now you hear nothing.”

A town built by glass

For 132 years, the glass plant was more than the largest employer in Charleroi.

It was the reason the town existed.

The first Belgian and French glassmakers arrived in 1893, bringing with them the trade that would define the borough for more than a century. The furnaces lit the riverbank. Families followed. Neighborhoods grew around the plant. Entire generations built their lives inside the factory walls.

Fathers taught sons how to swab molds and change presses. Mothers and daughters worked side by side in quality control, packing and decorating. Husbands and wives met there. Lunch breaks forged life-long friendships, and coworkers became family.

By the time the plant became known for making Pyrex, its identity and Charleroi’s had become impossible to separate.

In 2015, when Pyrex celebrated its 100th anniversary, the borough briefly renamed itself Pyrex, Pa. Streets filled with people. Workers wore shirts and hats with the Pyrex logo. Residents lined up to buy commemorative glassware.

For Briana Rapacchietta, one of the younger workers at the plant, it was one of the proudest memories she has.

Rapacchietta worked at the plant for 14 years, first in quality control and later as an electrician apprentice.

“We were one big Pyrex family,” Rapacchietta said. “We took so much pride in being the only maker of quality Pyrex glassware for over 100 years.”

The final months

That pride remained until the very end.

When workers learned in September 2024 that Anchor Hocking planned to close the Charleroi facility and move production to Ohio, it came as a shock.

The company had only recently purchased the plant, and workers were told Charleroi was advanced.

James Kennedy, who worked at the plant for 43 years, said employees were told the Charleroi operation was 30 years ahead technologically.

“Then three months later they announced they were moving all operations to Lancaster

for economical reasons,” Kennedy said. “But all of us know they were shutting us down to eliminate competition.”

Workers clung to hope because the date kept changing.

The company delayed the closure four times. Every extension gave employees another reason to believe something might still save the plant.

“We stayed till the end,” Roberts said. “They kept pushing it back four different times, and we kept hoping because Charleroi always made the money. We were the money makers.”

The last day

On April 11, 2025, everything changed. Shortly before noon, workers, former employees, relatives and local officials stood outside the plant waiting for the final whistle.

The furnaces were already shutting down. The last presses had gone quiet. Inside, workers removed the final pieces from 114 kiln.

Kennedy had completed his final shift only hours earlier, leaving the plant at 7 a.m. after working overnight.

“We can hold our heads high because we produced quality glass until the last piece was taken off 114 kiln,” Kennedy said.

Outside, people cried openly.

Some held one another. Others stood silently, staring at the whistle mounted above the plant.

For 132 seconds, one second for every year of glassmaking, the whistle echoed through the Mon Valley one last time.

For former employees and their families, it is hard to talk about that day.

“It was a very emotional day and it did not feel real to me,” Rapacchietta said. “I still get emotional and upset talking about it almost a year later.”

Starting over

For many workers, the closure was not simply the loss of a job.

It was the loss of routine, identity and purpose.

“I no longer feel like I have a purpose,” Rapacchietta said. “Working there really gave my life purpose and made me feel more like a member of the community.”

Nearly 300 jobs disappeared.

Some workers retired. Some found new jobs close to home. Others moved away.

David Lesher was among those forced to start over.

Lesher worked nearly 14 years at the plant, eventually becoming a mechanical maintenance technician after starting in finishing, then moving through mixing and melting.

He stayed nearly two weeks after production ended, helping to dismantle equipment and prepare the building for closure.

“My last day there was very sad,” Lesher said. “I made a lot of great friends there, some I consider family.”

After the plant closed, Lesher enrolled in CDL classes and earned a heavy equipment certificate. In August, he moved back to West Virginia to be closer to family.

He now works as a maintenance technician at a plant in South Charleston.

The move, he said, was hardest on his children.

“They spent their whole lives in Charleroi,” Lesher said. “They’re adapting well, but it was harder on them than it was for me.”

Others never left. Rapacchietta still lives in Charleroi. She has not found permanent work and now shops for and delivers groceries as an independent contractor.

The loss of the plant changed her family’s finances overnight.

“We had to drastically cut back spending,” she said. “We were doing really well with two incomes when I was working at the plant.”

Roberts said many families are still struggling a year later. She and her husband decided to stay.

Her husband worked two different jobs after the closure before finally finding steady work. Another family member employed at the plant lost their home, and now they all live together.

Roberts herself found work at California Area School District, but the pay is lower than what she made at the plant.

“We couldn’t just get up and move,” Roberts said. “We had to make it work here. Our life is here.”

For Kennedy, the closure looked different.

After more than four decades at the plant, he was able to retire.

Still, he said he thinks most often about the younger workers who had to begin again.

“I feel for the younger people and having to find new jobs,” Kennedy said. “We had a unique experience at our plant, and very much pride.”

Pride in their work

That pride is what nearly every former employee still talks about.

The people who worked there believed they made the best Pyrex in the world, not because a company told them so, but because they had spent generations proving it.

Tony Payne, who spent 36 years at the plant as an engineer, said the Charleroi factory felt different from any other place he had worked.

“People didn’t talk about how many years until they retired,” Payne said. “That wasn’t what happened in Charleroi.”

Instead, he said, workers stayed because they loved the people and the work.

“Corning cared about its employees, and they cared about their product,” Payne said. “That mentality was driven into every new employee, and they actually felt it.”

He said the culture inside the plant stretched far beyond the factory floor.

Entire families worked there. Workers attended one another’s weddings and funerals. Some met their spouses there. Payne said there were people who had spent so much time together that they felt more like relatives than coworkers.

“You gained another family when you went to work there,” Payne said.

Mike Pascanik, one of the last employees still working under contract at the site, said he saw the same thing over nearly 50 years at the plant.

“All the people that worked there, I grew up with them,” Pascanik said. “I gained another family.”

Former plant director Nick Iacovino said that culture was one of the reasons the Charleroi operation stood apart.

Iacovino became plant director in 2020, taking over the factory he had grown up looking at from his home across the street.

“There are people in that facility that knew it like the back of their hand,” Iacovino said. “They made the best Pyrex in the world, period.”

He never expected to become the last plant director.

Iacovino was let go in August 2024, one week before the closure was announced.

“I was completely blindsided,” he said. “I was the site director and I didn’t have a clue.”

Like many former workers, Iacovino and Payne still believe the closure never made sense.

“This should never have happened,” Payne said. “What they did, it did not make business sense.”

Payne said company leaders insisted production could simply be moved to Ohio.

Instead, he said, many of the products once made in Charleroi still cannot be produced there.

“Fifty percent of Pyrex is now being made outside of Anchor because they can’t make it,” Payne said. “They cannot make the products that we made.”

Roberts and Kennedy both believe the closure was never really about economics.

“They should have never been allowed to buy us,” Roberts said.

Kennedy put it more directly.

“They were shutting us down to eliminate competition,” he said.

Still fighting

That question now sits at the center of an antitrust case that is still dragging through the courts.

More than a year after the plant closed, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s lawsuit against Centre Lane Partners remains in discovery.

The case seeks to determine whether the merger between Anchor Hocking and Corelle Brands created an illegal monopoly in the glass bakeware market.

A key deadline is expected in late May.

In September, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to block the sale of the shuttered Charleroi plant to Sediver, an industrial glass manufacturer.

The FTC reportedly insisted that any future buyer continue some form of consumer glass production at the site.

According to Pascanik, German insulator manufacturer Sediver was prepared to buy the property and convert it into North America’s first glass insulator plant. He said another company, Blue Ridge Fiber Solutions of West Virginia, also toured the facility and explored a possible purchase before deciding against it after the holidays.

Meanwhile, in February, Jones Day, the law firm that represented Centre Lane Partners (owner of Anchor Hocking) sued the company for nearly $10 million in unpaid legal fees.

With no buyer secured, uncertainty has only deepened.

For now, the site is largely vacant. Much of the machinery has been removed. Conveyors, railings and presses are gone.

Payne said the chances of reopening the facility become smaller each day.

“Every day that goes by, the chances become less,” he said.

Still, he believes the property still has value because of its rail access, utility connections and permits.

“If there was a need for glass and somebody wanted to move quickly, you could save years by reopening Charleroi instead of starting from scratch,” Payne said.

Workers say the company continues to fail them, even now.

Roberts said many employees are still waiting for severance money they believe they are owed.

According to Roberts, the company reduced severance payments for workers who collected unemployment.

“They took half of our money,” she said. “There are still people they owe thousands of dollars to.”

The old plant still sits on Washington County’s tax rolls, but if it remains empty much longer, Charleroi could lose far more than a building.

“Nothing has come in yet to replace those jobs,” Iacovino said. “It’s just a slow deterioration.”

The effects are already visible.

Roberts said restaurants and businesses around town are quieter. The lines at McDonald’s are gone. Weekly lunch orders from plant crews no longer come in.

“These businesses have to be feeling it too,” Roberts said.

A century buried

In December, the people who once filled the plant gathered one more time.

They stood in Meadow Avenue Park on the hillside above the factory and looked down at the silent building where so many of them had spent their lives.

Then they buried a time capsule.

Inside were photographs, newspaper clippings, pieces of glass, handwritten letters, the whistle logbook and the American flag that flew at half-staff after the closure was announced.

Joe Dzurko helped lower it into the ground.

Dzurko worked 15 years at the plant as a line coordinator in automatics before leaving in February 2025 to take a job with Charleroi Borough’s street department.

By the time the time capsule ceremony took place, he had gone from working inside the plant to helping bury its memory.

“It was an honor to be able to bury the time capsule,” Dzurko said. “It felt like full circle.”

Payne helped organize the ceremony. He said he wanted workers to have something to remember besides grief.

“People needed something to focus on other than just the closing,” Payne said. “The history of that plant and that community deserved more than one article in the paper and then for everybody to just go away.”

Among the things Payne placed inside the capsule was a commemorative coffee mug made at the plant for his wedding.

“The plant was part of my life for 36 years, it meant a lot to me and to my wife,” he said. “And now that’s in the time capsule.”

Workers also sealed away the logbook from the plant’s final months, filled with messages from employees who took turns blowing the whistle.

“Some of the things people wrote in that book bring tears to your eyes,” Payne said.

For Dzurko, the ceremony was difficult, but necessary.

“It was a hard day, and it still is,” he said. “I know it’s still hard for a lot of people.”

Still, he is grateful to be part of preserving the memory of the place where he spent so much of his life.

Payne believes the people who open the capsule 100 years from now will understand exactly what the plant meant.

“They’re going to see pictures of people with smiles on their faces,” Payne said. “That place was a happy place.”

Former workers stay in touch.

They keep a Facebook group alive, check in during holidays and are planning a picnic this summer.

When one former worker recently lost both his wife and daughter within a month, Roberts said the old plant family rallied around him.

“We were one big dysfunctional family,” she said. “People took care of each other down there. We are still trying to take care of each other.”

For many, that may be the hardest part to explain to people who never worked there.

“People say it was just a job,” Rapacchietta said. “But to me and many others it was so much more than that.”

Looking ahead

For the people who built their lives inside the plant, the future is uncertain.

The legal fight continues. The FTC investigation remains unresolved. Sediver was blocked from buying the property. Blue Ridge Fiber Solutions walked away. At least one other company is still said to be interested, so people believe there is still a chance, however small, that the site could live again.

Roberts said she knows the odds grow longer with every month the building sits empty, but she still believes the workers would return if given the chance.

“If somebody opened that place again, people would come back,” Roberts said. “There are still people here who would go back tomorrow.”

Iacovino said the town can survive another employer, but not another lost piece of its identity.

“It’s an end to an era if it’s not another glass facility,” he said. “But you never say never.”

People who worked there are still waiting for proof that the story of glass in Charleroi is not finished.

Pascanik, one of the last employees still connected to the site, still sees possibility in the property.

The rail line is still there. The permits are still there. The shell of the plant still stands.

“I still have my fingers crossed that it’s going to start back up with some type of business,” Pascanik said. “You have to keep moving forward.”

Anchor Hocking did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.