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When Pascal walked into the plant, she found, along with all of the large glass chunks on the floor of the plant, a four ton monolith inside the furnace. This glass required a 75,000 pound crane to lift it into her studio when she returned to California. She carved a two ton portion of this huge glass monolith into “the tour-de-force” of her life, the “Seated Torso,” that took 10 years to complete and sold for $3 million dollars. It is the largest piece of carved glass in the world! It was purchased by billionaire John Kluge and after his death, it is purported to now be owned by Donald Trump!

Pascal’s long desire to sculpt glass was realized and the rest is history. Most of her glass works have sold between $10,000 and $300,000. A Madonna can be found at the Vatican and her patrons include many political and entertainment personalities. A Pascal carved glass horse with solid gold mane was purchased by Armand Hammer who gave it to Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their wedding day.

In her video, “Pascal: Reflections in Glass” she tells the story that while she teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris, one of her students asked her if she realized that theoretically she could not carve glass, to which Pascal replied, “I understand that but no one ever told me until I had already done it!” She went on to say that the only glass she could ever carve was found in an old glass plant “way up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, in a little town called Dunbar!”

That plant was the Pennsylvania Wire Glass Company, whose offices were in Philadelphia with the plant located in Dunbar. At one time, the glass plant was one of Dunbar’s largest employers.

The Continuous Press Glass Company began in the early 1900s and the name was changed to the Pennsylvania Wire Glass Company in 1910. The company changed hands in 1943 when an auction was held. The auction catalog shows many pictures of the properties and equipment that was up for sale. The G and W Wire Glass of New Castle bought the plant and sold it, the equipment and the land in 1963.

The plant produced three kinds of glass: flat wire glass, corrugated wire glass and actinic glass. It also produced flat glass that did not have any wire in it. The flat wire glass was used for windows and walls; the corrugated wire glass was used for roofing and the actinic glass was a special UV protective glass which came in colors. Copies of three glass plant catalogs were recently donated to the Dunbar Historical Society.

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