WILLIAMSBURG — Silent for almost four years, Snow Farm’s glass blowing studio fired up a new furnace this week, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated neighbor.

“It’s running — we’re making glass out of it as we speak,” Jay Brown said Friday.

Brown, a full-time electrician and avid glass blower, was the catalyst for reviving the craft program’s glass blowing operation. Fall 2019, the end of Snow Farm’s workshop season, was the last time the program had hot glass, he said. The pandemic shut everything down the following March, and when things reopened, the propane furnace stayed cold.

“The old furnace was too big for their needs, and too expensive to run,” Brown said.

He explained that the furnace, once fired up, took six days to get up to the right temperature — 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit — making it inconvenient to turn off and on. It would be fired up in July and stay on round the clock for the season, he said.

Brown, who studied glass blowing with Josh Simpson in Shelburne Falls, said he approached Executive Director Mary Jo Murphy and asked what he could do to get the furnace running again. He wound up offering to build a smaller furnace, a project that has taken him the last seven months to complete.

The design is by Mobile Glass Blowing Studios of Americus, Georgia.

“They sold us the blueprints,” Brown said.

Snow Farm secured the funding this time last year, he said, the parts showed up in December, and he started building it in January.

“I was in here nights and weekends,” he said. “I built it in the hot glass studio — turned it into a metal shop.”

The furnace holds 100 pounds of glass in the crucible and is so efficient, taking only 12 hours to get up to temperature, it can be turned off between classes. It will support a class of eight students, Brown said.

Marketing and development assistant Keely Quirk has been working at Snow Farm since 2021.

“Since I’ve been here we haven’t had glass blowing,” she said. “It’s really exciting. I’ve heard a lot from students — they want glass blowing back.”

Workshop season runs from May to October, with two-day to five-day programs. Brown himself will teach the first class with the new furnace, a two-day workshop beginning Sept. 22.

Six classes are planned, Quirk said, and the shorter ones are open to teens as well as adults.

“A lot of classes are open to beginners,” she said, with instructors skilled at getting people comfortable dealing with the challenges of working around extreme temperatures.

“Now we’ll be able to do all sorts of different workshops,” Brown said. “It’s so nice — it’s a great little studio.”

James Pentland can be reached at jpendland@gazettenet.com.]]>