At the heart of glassmaking, sand, potash, and lead oxide were melted at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and skilled glassblowers and gaffers shaped the hot glass into beautiful and practical forms. On this spot, Christian Dorflinger built his first five-pot furnace and seven houses for the first workers who came to make glass. As the factory grew, so did the community, drawing skilled craftsmen to White Mills from France, Germany, Ireland, England, Sweden, Bohemia, and other European countries, bringing skills acquired through long apprenticeship and thousands of years of practical experience passed down through generations. In the late nineteenth century, Dorflinger and his fellow glassworkers represented the height of the art of glassmaking, though with the dawn of the twentieth century the emphasis shifted from the art of glassmaking to the science of glassmaking. Born in 1828 in Rosteig in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, Dorflinger apprenticed at age ten to an uncle at the Cristalleries de St. Louis, finished at eighteen, and came to the United States to work first in Camden, New Jersey. In 1852 he opened a glass factory in Brooklyn, New York, making kerosene lamp chimneys, and that same year he married Elizabeth Hagen, with whom he had ten children. Within ten years he had opened two more glass factories, including the Greenpoint Flint Glass Works, but according to family history the strain of operating them was too much. He bought a farmhouse in White Mills in 1862, and by the mid-1860s had built a glass factory there where he concentrated on making the finest lead crystal for glass cutting. The company operated until 1921, and Christian Dorflinger died in 1915.