Aug 31, 2013 6 min read

Prem Trollope of London, England, remembers her first glimpse of Greene County in 1996.

“I woke up in Holbrook in a blue house,” she said.

You might have seen her around Waynesburg this summer, clad in many shades of orange, enjoying a bite to eat and a good chat with friends at the Wednesday farmers market on Church Street, or popping into Mickey’s Mens store for another present – something Carhartt or Levi – to take home.

But mostly she spent her days tucked into one of the work stations behind the showroom at Our Glass Creations on High Street, cutting, arranging and fusing yet another piece of colorfully layered glass art.

“I honestly had no idea when I first started coming to see America that I would find I could no longer imagine myself without Waynesburg – even without a coffee shop,” Trollope admitted, grinning. “A Russian woman asked me, ‘What in the world have you found there?’ and I said, ‘Sunshine, green stuff and nice people.’ I remember talking to Craig Pellegrini at Café Press when we first met, and he asked me the same thing. When I told him, he said, ‘Why that’s pure random!’ And I think he’s right.”

Random was definitely at work in 1996. Trollope was working for Marie Nicolas, an old friend of Bill Deegan and Rosanna Lane, owners of that blue house in Holbrook. Deegan and Lane were in London visiting friends they hadn’t seen in years, and when they left, Trollope had an open invitation to visit them when she was ready for her first American tour.

“It was spring, and I was finishing up my first year training to be a teacher. That July my son, Claude, and I flew into Pittsburgh, and Bill picked us up,” she said. “I saw Pittsburgh and thought that was it. But then we kept driving and driving and when I woke up … “

For a week, Trollope and 9-year-old Claude visited with the many “friends of Bill and Rose.” Then it was off on a Greyhound bus tour that included Nashville ,Tenn., and Phoenix, Ariz.

“I drove on American roads the first time in Flagstaff,” Trollope said. “We drove to the Grand Canyon and spent four days in a motel.”

The sheer size and geographic diversity of America was beginning to sink in as the miles rolled by and Trollope grew accustomed to driving on the “wrong” side of the road. They were heading to Los Angeles to do a guided tour of the West Coast with friends and family as guides.

Two years later they were back. After visiting their new friends in Greene County, Trollope borrowed a car and drove to Dollywood to satisfy her fascination with both Dolly Parton and the American country music genre that has roots in tunes brought to the colonies from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

“The night before leaving London, I had met a man at a party who was from Black Mountain near Ashville, N.C. He told me about his family and said, ‘Come stay with us’. So we made it there, stayed a week and hit it off. After that, we stayed with them whenever we came to North Carolina.”

Trollope was now an elementary teacher, with great stories about America to tell her students. “On the even years,” when school let out in London in mid-July, Trollope and her son packed their bags and headed for Greene County, then on to another adventure of camping, staying with friends across the states and taking new routes to find new experiences – boatbuilding in Alabama, touring New Orleans, traipsing across Texas playing Willy Nelson recordings while seeing the Great American West.

Packing to go home in 2000, Trollope remembers filling her bags with thrift-shop treasures and a set of hand-forged colonial “squirrel sticks” that fit together nicely enough to roast a squirrel – or toast slices of bread in a London flat – over an open flame.

“I went through security with an ice-cream maker I’d gotten at Hidden Treasures tied to the outside of my bag and my squirrel sticks sticking out, and they never said a word,” Trollope said. “Try doing that today!”

When she came back to Greene County, Trollope found herself noticing the new face Waynesburg was presenting. There was a farmers market on Wednesdays, Audrey Huffman’s Corner Shop on High Street had been reborn as an art gallery, and Our Glass Creations had its doors open for business in the next block. Stopping by for the first time, Trollope saw the work tables covered with half-finished projects and people using tools of the stained-glass trade and felt an immediate connection.

“I was so impressed,” Trollope said. “Somewhat uncharacteristically for me, I found myself asking the owners, Beth Day and Karen Calvert, if I could come back next year and be an apprentice. They said yes.”

Trollope returned in 2011 and settled in to learn a new art form.

“That first year I worked for six weeks exclusively in stained glass, and the second year I came back to do stained glass, but for the last week I did fused glass,” Trollope said. “I had tears in my eyes. I went home and bought a kiln.”

Trollope’s colors and patterns channel the light and the glass, and when heated just right, slumps over curved forms to become bowls, lipped plates, flanged containers or simply works of art.

“I share what I’ve learned with my students. In science class they learn that glass comes from sand and how it is made. Our favorite art projects have become making glass,” Trollope said.

Being a summertime apprentice at Our Glass hasn’t limited Trollope’s chances to see America up close and personal. Trollope fell in love with the stately architecture and hill-sculpted neighborhoods of Pittsburgh last summer after she took her first tour.

Chasing down those perfectly colored slabs of glass to be transformed into art has led her, Calvert and Day to small glassmaking river towns in West Virginia and Ohio, and friends are always ready to take her to out-of-the-way places or must-see attractions.

“I enjoy being here in town with its nooks and crannies and nice people,” Trollope said as she finished her last piece of glass art for the season and held it up to catch the light. “But I miss the coffee shop. Get another one and treasure it.”

Last Wednesday, Trollope packed her lamentably small carry-on luggage, full to the gills with those special pieces of America that either can’t be found or are shockingly expensive in London – mostly brass and copper fixtures from Home Depot – and was off to Greater Pittsburgh Airport.

But she’ll be back.