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The Westford Glass Works 1857-1873 In 1885, he was elected as director and the next year as president of the Willimantic Savings Institute, holding the position two years through a critical financial period and placed the institution back on a sound fiscal base. He soon after began a grain mill in the city, which was located near the center of the city with bin capacities of 12 to 15 thousand bushels. The works operated by a 40-horse engine. Buck's public positions began when he attained his majority (21 years of age). In 1856, he served as state representative, the youngest member of the House. He held nearly every town office at different times - constable, selectman, assessor, clerk and judge of probate, and served several terms as a state representative. During the rebellion, he strongly supported the Union cause and, in 1862, was appointed by the town of Ashford to fill its quota of soldiers. In 1876, he was elected treasurer of the state and served two years. During the year of the Journal article, 1894, he was serving as Bank Commissioner of Connecticut. George recalled that his father hired a man on the spot when the man shattered a huge glass blood amber lightning rod ball with a rifle on top of his father's barn. The ball had been blown at the Westford factory. George also remembers when his grandfather employed about 50 men. Each was paid $18 a day. Buck explained that his grandfather's business flourished because of the factory location on the Continental Road that led to Boston through Boston Hollow and to New York southward. George Buck moved his family from Ashford to Rutland, Mass., in the 1960s. Left behind are the remnants of the Westford factory in tangled underbrush - some of the furnace pots, blowpipes used as fence posts, and parts of the buildings that once stood on that location plus a trench filled with broken glass bottles and other shards. George's son, Edwin Buck, sold native honey for a few years. The Buck family continued to live several years in the modest home tucked away along a forgotten road in Massachusetts far from where the glass factory produced great quantities of blown and molded glass for commercial use. The Westford property presently is owned by Ralph Fletcher, a former First Selectman of Ashford.