Back in 2013, the company behind the venerable Ball jar commissioned a tiny test of vintage-inspired quart jars in the obscure color of Georgia Green. Only 288 were ever produced, and I wound up with two cases! Here’s how it happened.
If you’re from the Midwest, chances are you’ve used a Ball jar, whether for canning fruit in the kitchen, storing spare screws in the garage, or drinking at some trendy hipster eatery. Even people who’ve never canned a thing recognize the logo. The company traces its roots in Muncie back to the 1880s, when the five Ball brothers moved their Mason jar business from New York to Indiana in search of cheap natural gas.
Years after Ball came to Indiana, its corporate story became a tangled web. Ball stopped making glass jars in Muncie in 19621. In 1993, the company spun off its consumer products division into a separate firm called Alltrista2. Ball itself exited the glass business three years later3. Alltrista became Jarden Home Brands in 20054, then Jarden merged with Newell-Rubbermaid in 20164. Newell still markets Ball jars today, manufactured by a vendor and sold under license from Ball Corp.
I worked for the Ball brand under Jarden and Newell for seven years and experienced practically ever corner of that world. I worked in consumer affairs, marketing, quality, and plant management! Alongside my tenure came the Georgia Green jars during my time on the marketing team. 2013 was the hundredth anniversary of the iconic Ball Perfect Mason jar, after all. To celebrate, we introduced a special blue pint jar dressed with a vintage logo. They flew off the shelves at a ridiculous pace! One headline joked that “Everyone has a case of the blue Balls.” Demand was through the roof.
What seemed to confuse consumers, though, was the inscription near the heel of the jars, which read “1913-1915 / 100 YEARS OF AMERICAN HERITAGE.” The tag was meant to show that the blue jars were the first release in a three-year series. Over time, we intended to celebrate the introduction of the Perfect Mason, the Perfection, and the Improved jars. I recall some discussion about the order (it’s hard to “Improve” an already “Perfect” Mason), but we decided that the next jar would the Perfection, and that it’d be produced in a shade of dark green.
Standard Ball jars are clear today, but early examples were often aqua or blue. Those hues came from iron in the sand Ball sourced from the Hoosier Slide near Michigan City. Ball also manufactured early jars in clear (flint in the glass business) along with amber, but the company’s furnaces ran continuously. Unexpected colors like greens ranging from apple to olive to Mountain Dew sometimes made it through as the batch gradually changed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an authentic old Perfection jar in green, but it was the thought that counted.
Another issue, at least to me, was that those hundred-year-old Perfection and Improved jars sealed with what was once a major innovation: a glass lid clamped down by a threaded metal band. There was absolutely no chance that design would ever return to production given the two-piece lid and band, but I brought it up anyway. Sometimes being obsessed with history means getting hung up on trivial details. For many reasons, my request for accuracy was denied.
Still, we came out with an awesome product. Although the 2013 blue Perfect Mason jar was only produced as a pint, we decided the green Perfection jar would come in two sizes: pint and quart. Molds for the pint had been tested through the production run of the Perfect Mason jars, but the quart was an entirely new design. That meant we needed a small test run to make sure everything worked correctly.
To pull it off, we squeezed a brief production run of Improved quarts into the schedule while our glass vendor was busy turning out a massive batch of Bacardi bottles. Not long afterward, five cases of Georgia Green quart jars arrived at the office. By that point, I’d become a fairly serious Ball jar collector, with a variety of oldies including an aqua Buffalo pint like this one. To my shock, I was lucky enough to receive two cases of what are among the rarest modern Ball jars ever produced!
The green jars proved hugely popular once they finally reached stores. Lightning struck thrice in 2015, with the release of purple Improved pints and quarts inspired by old jars that turned amethyst when exposed to the sun. Those production runs weren’t particularly rare, but collectors and home canners ate them up! As for me, I sold one of my two cases of Georgia Green prototypes to another collector to help establish a secondhand market. The others stayed with me, and those rare specimen are what inspired today’s post.
History is littered with rare Ball jars. There’s the milk glass commemorative Ideal quart, the unsanctioned Perfect Mason quart with KKK imagery on the base, the amber Thermos half-gallons, Century Modernistic packer jars, and others like BBGMCO jars and the Christmas Masons. Still, those pale green quarts occupy a strange little corner of Ball jar history. Never meant for shelves, most collectors probably still have no idea they exist. That’s part of what fascinates me about them! So much history, whether it involves old buildings, forgotten roads, or even Mason jars, survives because of minuscule moments nobody thought would matter at the time.
Sources Cited
1 Union Withdraws Court Suit on Ball Shutdown (1962, February 3). The Muncie Star. p. 1.
2 Buck, T. (1993, April 2). Alltrista Gears Up For Life Without Ball. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 12.
3 Ball Corp. sells interest in glass company (1996, September 16). The Kokomo Tribune. p. 9.
4 McBride, M. (2005, February 16). Alltrista changes name to Jarden Home Brands. The Muncie Star Press. p. 11.
5 Newell Rubbermaid and Jarden Corporation Announce Consumer Goods Combination with $16 Billion Revenue (2015, December 14). Newell Brands [Atlanta]. Web. Retrieved May 14.
That was interesting. I had never heard of the KKK BB jar before. I would love the marketing history reasoning behind that. Presumably since Indiana was the center of the the revived klan in the 1920s and 1930s someone thought it would sell. Makes me wonder who, if anyone, in the Ball Brothers hierarchy was a member?
It was actually not an officially sanctioned jar. My understanding is that a low-level employee carved the mold essentially after hours. Only a handful are thought to exist.