Irish and Scottish immigrants to the U.S. brought the tradition of carving scary faces on turnips and placing them in doorways around Halloween to scare away wandering ghosts around 1840. They quickly figured out that it was much easier to carve pumpkins, which are readily abundant in October.
Pumpkins were prevalent at American Halloween festivals and home parties, and in magazine and newspaper Halloween-themed articles by the late 1800s. Today, the tradition continues in October as homes and businesses are decorated with pumpkins, including glass pumpkins.
Molly Stone, the co-owner of Cohn-Stone Studios in Richmond, created her first glass pumpkin in 1990. She had a failed pumpkin crop in that year which left her nothing to decorate the garden with for her daughter’s October party. She decided to create glass pumpkins for the event as she and her husband Michael Cohn are artists specializing in hand-blown glass. Other local glass-blowing artists were experimenting with the form within a couple of years.
Bobby Bowes and Mike Binnard, founders of the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI), launched the first Great Glass Pumpkin Patch in Palo Alto in 1996. This showcased 750 glass pumpkins. All sold, and the proceeds funded the startup of a community glass studio. The next year featured 1,000 glass pumpkins and in recent years over 10,000. Today, a percentage of the proceeds go to BAGI and the Palo Alto Art Center Foundation…