The Goldsworthy Collection

The Beginning

Young Fred Goldsworthy had it tough. His mother came down with TB and had to go to a sanitarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He went to live with his grandmother Antoinette or “Nettie” in Twin Falls, Idaho. His father and then his grandmother died, the latter before he was 5 years old. He became a civil engineer and worked on many of the major water reclamation projects in the west.

His Uncle Harold, a bachelor, who had stayed in Twin Falls with his father, Richard, came to the stage of life when he entered a nursing home. In the summer of 1965 Fred and Ruth went to the old homestead to clean it out. Goldy described cleaning out a 60+ year old bachelor’s house as “slave labor.” Near the end of many days of work some boxes were found in the old coal shed. In one of these five or six pieces of ruby stained glass were found. Fred suddenly remembered the red glasses in Nettie’s china cupboard. If he was a “good boy,” he could get a glass from the cupboard for his milk and cookies. They never found the tumblers but one of their first purchases consisted of six ruby stained tumblers.

The Pieces from the Coal Shed

Ruth and Fred began collecting in 1968, building on the pieces they had found in the old coal shed. Fred retired in 1974 but passed within a matter of a few months. Goldy continued to collect and was adding pieces to the collection until the late 1990s.

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