If you plan to visit the Barlow Fair this weekend you would likely take Ohio 550 west of Marietta. Along the way you will pass the interestingly named Silver Globe Road. The road joins the highway near an ordinary concrete building a few yards from the highway. The building may be plain, but it was once home to the Marietta Silver Globe Company, where unique globes were once produced and shipped all over.

Gazing balls, as they are called, are a glass decoration that you place in your yard. They were first produced in Venice, Italy in the 13th century. They have through history gone by many names, including globes of happiness, mirror balls, lawn balls, yard balls and witch balls.

The business started in a small building near the Washington County Fairgrounds in 1947 by George Rigaux before moving to Montgomery Street and finally to Pinehurst in the late 1950s, according to a 1994 feature in The Times. The business would remain in the family for generations.

“Mad” King Lugwig of Bavaria enjoyed them so much he had them produced in a wide variety of sizes and hung them from trees, floated them in ponds and displayed them around his castles. The glass decorations we hang on Christmas trees today may have started with Lugwig’s obsession. They have enjoyed moderate popularity since then, taking their place alongside sundials, birdbaths and gnomes.

The idea is that when you look at the balls you see a reflection of your entire garden in them. It looks somewhat like the wide-angle view that you get with a fisheye camera lens. You can see a globe in a Marietta yard on page 2 of today’s times. In it you will see Marietta reflecting in a Harmar Hill gazing ball. You will also see me in the reflection.

Because they were produced locally, it was once very common to see them in area yards. Even though the company was called The Silver Globe Company, the ones produced along Ohio 550 came in silver, blue, green, red, gold and purple. The furnaces used to melt the glass were kept at 1,900 degrees, so when operating, you could normally see into the plant when driving down the highway regardless of the season. They were shipped all over the country through a network of 700 distributors and retailed from $18 to $40 depending on the size. Now a company that produces countertops occupies the building.

I have always been a lawn art fan, as long as the artwork is simple. You cannot get any simpler than a shiny glass ball, so we have tried several times to have them in our landscaping. The smooth curved glass always gets reduced to a pile of jagged broken glass. Winter, pets, wind and rocks thrown up by a passing lawn mower can reduce your thing of beauty to something that you need to clean up in an instant.

After breaking several, we broke down and ordered a metal one online a few years ago. It arrived wrapped like a ball. Along the way someone must have tried to dribble it like a basketball because it had a dent in it. We hid the dent, but it’s there, distorting the otherwise perfect wide-angle view of our garden.

Art Smith is online manager of The Times, he can be reached at asmith@newsandsentinel.com