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Washington Glass Company, Pairpoint is the oldest operating glassblowing company in the United States. Situated on the Cape Cod Canal in Sagamore, Massachusetts, it has produced hand-blown crystal, reverse-painted lamps, and other artisan glass items using 19th- century techniques and original tools for nearly two centuries. RS P.E. Guerin Founded in 1857 by French immigrant Pierre Emmanuel Guerin, P.E. Guerin is the oldest decorative hardware firm in the United States and the only operating metal foundry in New York City. The company has been at its current address on Jane Street in Greenwich Village since 1892. Four generations of the same family have run it since — the current owner, Andrew F. Ward, is Guerin's great grandnephew. Every piece is cast, hand-chased, and finished in the Greenwich Village foundry. RS Harrisville Designs Yarn has been spun in Harrisville, New Hampshire, since 1794, when the Harris family built many of the first water-powered woolen mills along the Nubanusit River. When the last of those operations closed in 1970, John J. Colony III founded Harrisville Designs the following year to keep the tradition alive. Today the company spins 100 percent virgin wool in the same brick mill buildings that have defined the village for two centuries — the only 19th-century textile village in America that survives in its original form, and the 59 plaster mixed with perlite, each eagle was gilded in gold leaf by Atlanta-based gilder Desiree Harper at the Casci workshop, then sealed for weather. The entire commission took six weeks. RS Pendleton Woolen Mills The roots of Pendleton Woolen Mills reach back to 1863, when English master weaver Thomas Kay arrived in Oregon and established himself as a force in the region's growing wool industry. His daughter Fannie passed the trade onto her three sons, and they opened a mill in 1909 in Pendleton, Oregon. It has run continuously under family ownership ever since, making it one of the oldest continuously operating textile mills in the United States. Pendleton is best known for its wool blankets and geometric patterns developed through decades of collaboration with Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, as well as America's National Parks. RS Pairpoint Glass Company Founded in 1837 as the Mount oldest textile site in the country still actively producing cloth and selling looms. RS McKissack & McKissack The firm's roots trace to Moses McKissack, an enslaved West African builder whose descendants carried the family trade forward across generations until Moses McKissack III and his brother Calvin formalized it into McKissack & McKissack in Nashville in 1905 — the oldest Black-owned architecture and design firm in the United States. One early commission was the Carnegie Library at Fisk University. Now in its fifth generation under Deryl McKissack, the firm has completed more than 6,000 projects nationwide — including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture. RS North Bennet Street School Founded in 1881 in Boston's North End, the North Bennet Street School is the most prestigious traditional trades school in the country, training craftspeople in bookbinding, cabinet making, carpentry, jewelry, piano technology, preservation carpentry, violin PHOTO BY AUGUSTINE H FOLSOM. COLLECTION BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY. COURTESY DIGITAL COMMONWEALTH Left, above: Moses McKissack III, early 1900s. Left: Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C., McKissack & McKissack. P.E. Guerin was founded in 1857. Roman spout and knobs, below. Wood-working room, no. 39, North Bennet Street, 1892 Pendleton Woolen Mills