I’ve really gotta hand it to the Cast Iron World as a whole. There have been quite a few myths addressed either in The Cast Iron Field Guide or elsewhere on this site as part of The Cast Iron Historical Society. The first was Krone Kast. When I got involved with cast iron cookware, I was naturally drawn to it as a Germanophile. It was my first deep dives on cast iron, and one of my most unhinged deep dives on the topic to date. I never expected the German-made myth to die, but it’s probably been over a year since I last heard it…and the last few times I did, OTHER people were rebutting it. That’s excellent. It shows that people in the hobby of cast iron care about accuracy.
Next was The Favorite. The pervasive myth that Columbus Hollow Ware contracted with prisons in producing their The Favorite line was painstakingly debunked by Danny Hoffman. He and I became good friends when I reached out to him to ask to reference his research on The Favorite in The Cast Iron Field Guide. Like me, his only object is to get good information out there and we’ve been talking probably close to daily since.
The two most recent attempts at addressing myths are with the constant labeling of tea kettles as “humidifiers” and toy stoves as “salesmans samples.” I’ve seen a slight uptick in advocacy for the correct terminology in both cases since having written about them, and all four of these myth-busting reads are some of the consistently most popular posts on this site.
So thank you! We can read until our eyes are bloodshot, and write until our heads hurt, and argue until we need medication. But without people who care about accuracy because they believe that caring about the past means you owe it accuracy…we’d get nothing done.
Today we’re going to take on a real beast of a myth, but it’s not just myth busting we’re after. With this post, we’re hoping to build a bit of a critical eye when it comes to identifying features and assessing age of different pieces. First we’re going to talk about how thing were cast, and then we’re going to talk about how to train our eye to look for unique aspects of design that can help clue us in.
Some of this is directly plagiarized from The Cast Iron Field Guide. But seeing as how there’s a whole section of that book called “Why You Should Pirate This Book” as well as the fact that I wrote that book as well as this post, we’re good. It’s a jumping off point to a more truncated discussion of what that book is essentially about–which is how to understand what we are looking at by correllating it with existing records.
Throughout the 19th century there were basically three methods by which iron hollowware was cast, one of which overlaps with the 18th century, while the other overlaps with the 20th century (and is still used today). It was all sand casting however, with the primary difference being how the molds were gated.
Sand casting means that a master cast (often wood, sometimes brass or another metal, sometimes plaster, sometimes even another piece of cookware) was used to make a two piece mold of sand mixed with water or oil and often clay as an additional binder. The two halves (the cope and the drag) make what’s called a casting flask. A gate was opened on part of the mold to allow molten iron to flow through. Once cooled, the piece was removed and the excess iron from the gate was broken off and could be either filed or ground down.
The earliest gating method we’re going to talk about is called top gating. Top gated casting has essentially a straight tube or channel (called a sprue) leading directly to the mold. The top of the mold is usually the bottom of the piece (hence top gating), to allow fewer defects that could affect the use or aesthetic of it.
This is an oversimplified illustration from The Cast Iron Field Guide that gives a decent idea of how a top gated casting would work.
These molds filled up very rapidly and the velocity of the molten iron often caused erosion of the mold. In constructing a mold, sand is “rammed” to ensure it is packed firmly enough, and any deficiencies often cause critical failures with top gating. As a result, many early pieces are pretty rough castings and sand inclusions are common.
This is not one of those rough castings, and honestly it’s not that early of a casting, either. In the center there is a little round bump. That’s the round gate mark, also referred to as a sprue mark. This is a fairly “late” (meaning maybe 1860s) piece to be cast this way and it’s thought that the person who made the mold was trained by someone comfortable with the previous generation of casting.
Pieces cast with this method have a round gate, also called a sprue mark, usually on the center of the bottom of the piece. They can sometimes be tricky to identify though, because many foundries were clever and designed the molds so that the sprue became a leg or a handle.
By the end of the 18th century (but possibly closer to mid century) a method called bottom gating was developed. This allowed iron to flow down and around the bottom of the mold, filling it from below. In bottom gating the mold was flipped right side up to again allow the bottom of the piece to take the brunt of the casting defects.
Filling from below means that the iron is much more controlled, resulting in a lot less erosion of the pattern and (ideally) far finer castings. The catch is that iron traveling further and more slowly means it has more time to cool, and so bottom gated castings have their own suite of casting defects. That said, bottom gating allowed truly beautiful castings to become common, with foundries incorporating incredible artistry in their designs.
This one is an oversimplified diagram of bottom gated casting. Don’t use this as an example of how a mold was set up, it’s just indicative of the changes in how iron filled the cavity and how the flow of iron would’ve been slowed by the design.
The bottom gate mark is seen as a straight scar across the bottom of pieces. Keeping in mind that we now know it was the bottom of the mold that was gated and not necessarily the bottom of the piece, this makes perfect sense. Bottom gate marks can also often be seen as an indentation or shadow on the cooking surface. Many times sulfur and condensation pitting from years of use, or even factory (or subsequent) has obliterated the obvious bottom gate mark, and it can take a trained eye to see.
Lasty, the molds sometimes included a vent, or a “weep” which allowed gasses and excess iron to flow out of the mold rather than backing up and overflowing, or a vacuum from forming and preventing the mold from being properly filled. These can be evident from a small circular mark on the bottom of a piece (and thus can be confused with a round gate) and may also have been disguised as button feet.
A footed round bottom spider with an apparent vent.
Sometime likely during the later part of the first half of the 19th century, but definitely in use by the 1860s, a method called side gating was developed. In side gating, iron flows through the side or sides of a mold, filling it quickly and efficiently. Side gating allows multiple points of entry into the mold with a gate mark that can be filed and polished to be almost, if not completely, invisible. It also (eventually) allowed multiple pieces to be cast with one pour, paving the way toward the mass production seen by the early 20th century. So successful and efficient was side gating that the Lodge skillet that you got at Target has a side gate.
Here’s the handy dandy simplied diagram of side gated casting. The smaller gates further throttle the velocity of the molten iron and allow for more control. Multiple possible points of entry allow for even filling.
Despite being developed at different times and yielding considerably different results, foundries decided for themselves which gating method best suited them. Foundries well established with bottom gating equipment and experience often didn’t switch over to side gating. Similarly, rural foundries would often use existing cookware as molds and produce pieces at a small scale, often using bottom gating. Many times these pieces will apparently have two, sometimes intersecting bottom gate marks OR be a piece with the mark of a foundry that did not ever use bottom gating or a piece cast well after bottom gating was abandoned by the foundry that produced them (Erie and Griswold recasts come to mind).
The side gate mark is only evident by faint grinding marks on this early 20th century Lodge skillet.
It’s worth noting that despite the inaccuracy of using gating methods to date pieces, recasts were often functional and not made as counterfeits. They do tend to be considerably less collectible overall, although some people love the blatant historical aspect of recast pieces.
At this point I have to stress that a mosaic of features have to be considered when dating a piece, and that it can only be as old as its newest feature. That is perhaps the most critical component of this post. No one feature is completely diagnostic of age, especially if you start taking other parts of the world into consideration. I can make a bottom gated skillet today, and if that were one’s only criteria for a piece being 19th century, what would stop that determination from being made?
So all that said, hope is not lost. Bottom gating may be useless as anything other than a time frame to start your search. But it cannot end there. If you see a bottom gate and say it’s a 19th century piece because of that…if you’re correct it’s by accident.
I don’t have a lot of 20th century pieces. Really my collection is pretty modest these days. Iron is heavy, and moving to Germany and back in a short amount of time will have you really reassessing your priorities after paying that kind of shipping bill.
But one of my favorite pieces is my Barstow Lafayette stove. The Barstow Stove Company is the aspect of the United States stove industry that I know the best, and arguably better than anyone else (and it’s a strong argument). The Barstow Stove Company stopped producing stoves at its foundry in 1927. In 1930, they closed up for good but their name continued as the naming rights and many of the patterns had been purchased by the Leonard & Baker Stove Company out of Taunton, Massachusetts.
Leonard & Baker offered some Barstow products, some of their own with the Barstow name, and others from the Barstow line were available by special order up until roughly the end of WWII. I call this time period the Zombie Barstow period. Barstow was undead. Its name and life was continued after its demise.
My Barstow Lafayette range is one of these Zombie pieces. It cannot have been manufactured before 1930, as it was made by Leonard & Baker, and is even marked by them. Some others of this time period are marked “Barstow Stove Company, Taunton Mass.” Barstow didn’t exist in Taunton. Those are Leonard & Baker, too.
It could have been made basically through the 1940s. And you know what? Almost every piece of this stove is bottom gated. If you saw the name Barstow, you’d think 19th century. If you saw the bottom gating, you’d think 19th century. But if you dig a wee bit further, and then further still, you find out that it’s an old name being put on a piece cast with an almost obsolete gating method at a relatively late date. It was also a Leonard & Baker stove and never offered by Barstow.
So, that mosaic. It can vary from piece to piece, manufacturer to manufacturer, and timeframe to timeframe. What you should do, and what I’ve worked to establish a foundation for, is note some prominent manufacturers in different regions. I don’t care what, but they were everywhere and there were thousands of them. I focus on Rhode Island, more broadly on New England, and with a smattering of New York. Going from there I know less and less specifics.
I lay out the general traits in The Cast Iron Field Guide and that’s a good place to start, but you don’t have to start there. Find some trade catalogues (there are a lot of them digitally available and I’ve linked them elsewhere on this site). Notice the unique aspects of the pieces displayed. What’s the handle look like on that skillet? What’s the pour lip look like? What do the bail ears on the kettles or pots look like? What do the waffle irons look like? What do the handles on the SAD iron heaters look like? Take note of the foundry name and think of likely abbreviations.
Be discerning. NONE of these are the same handle. Same motif, but different handle from different regions and different time periods. The 8 is on top is the most common, and was most likely produced some time between the 1870s and at least end the 1920s (based on various catalogue images). Beneath that is a skillet with a fairly rounded bottom which was most likely produced in New York between the 1830s and 1850s. Under that is a New England area pattern, from probably about the 1850s through about 1870. Beneath that is an Isaac A. Sheppard, which was manufactured from 1860 until about the turn of the 20th century, but it’s worth noting that I. A. Sheppard closed up shop in 1933, so if someone wanted this thing, they could’ve made it. On the bottom is a Marietta, which was made by the Marietta Hollowware & Enameling Co., between 1870 and 1950. Why so late? Because that’s the year they were liquidated in bankruptcy. There are probably at least a dozen similar handles. All have some notable difference, whether it be size of the hole, the reinforcing pad as it hits the body of the piece, the moulding being slightly different, the handle coming to a point, or something else. Pay attention to the finer details and don’t be too hasty to make the call–every aspect of design was a decision. Similar is not good enough to say it’s the same.
Take that name and the abbreviations and search somewhere. Go to local historical society websites and email the contacts asking for finding aids. See if there are any digital catalogues available there (if there are, send me the link so I can add them to my list!). Go to Google Books and try and find mentions of the foundry in Business Directories or other records. Check newspaper records and the Library of Congress Website. Establish a timeline, even a loose one.
Forget the notion that 19th century foundries didn’t keep records. You didn’t get to become a literal millionaire in an incredibly competitive and ingenious industry in the 19th century without keeping incredibly meticulous records. They exist, even if they’re not on Google.
Look for records of foundries in neighboring states. Try and find records of those foundries. Who came first? Did you find a catalogue? What do the skillets and heaters and kettles look like?
See the pattern here? We have ALL seen a pan and been like “what the heck is up with that pour lip!?” It wasn’t an accident. It was designed to be unique and they advertised what they had designed. Excellent chance they depicted it somewhere. Note what’s unique, note where made it, try and find what was unique elsewhere. That’s how you establish the date range, and it’s how you move the history underpinning this hobby forward.
To me, it’s also where the fun is. Finding a cool piece of iron and showing it off to the community is great, but there are just so many mysteries still to solve within this hobby. As gratifying as putting together a set may be, those mysteries are rarely solved by owning 57 Griswold skillets (if you own 57 Griswold skillets, this isn’t about you, specifically, it’s just a funny number). All that time spent collecting, though. The driving and the hunting through antique shops. Exhilarating though that is, I’d like anyone reading this, who is also invested in collecting cast iron, to spend 10 minutes doing the following:
Where do you live? Take the nearest major city, and head over to books.google.com and search for that city stove manufacturers. And then turn the search filters to 19th century only. You’ll find some business directories and other things that list stove manufacturers or iron founders or “iron castings of all kinds.” From there, there are two things you can do…though one tends to lead to a lot more work than the other.
The first is to just Google “x foundry annual catalogue” or something to that effect. Maybe you’ll luck out and one is posted by a local historical society or university or museum. That does happen (I’ve found a lot of them that way, again, see the trade literature section). Or, and this is the more labor intensive version–find the website of the historical society or museum within that city. Email the info address, the research address, or the collections address. Let them know you’re local to the area and are looking for information regarding X foundry, which was in the city in whatever date range was loosely suggested by your Google Books search.
An image from Resor’s 1878 catalogue next to Danny Hoffman’s identical skillet. Be careful though, there are a LOT of handles that look like this, but are different. This catalogue can be found on the Digital Trade Literature page.
Ask if there are any collections or materials related to that foundry. Try and source newspaper archives–there will often be incorporation and dissolution records there. Be super courteous…the people on the other side of these emails are often volunteers, and have devoted a large chunk of their lives and energy to preserving this history. They’re also humans. Lastly…I founded Everyday Anthropology in 2017 and the network of contacts at museums and historical societies as well as the networking skill set I’ve developed since led to some very fast research being done when I started work on the Field Guide (the Field Guide was initially going to be a fairly short pamphlet and it quickly ballooned).
Every once in a while there’s someone in a group that seems to know an obnoxious amount about this stuff. They’ll get tagged in ID requests and baffle those leaving the “it’s gatemarked. Impossible to ID. Pre Pelopponesian War” comments. Some of the people who have seemingly all of the information may be easier or more difficult to deal with than others. Some of them are more or less forthcoming with sources and even rationale.
But this is the type of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. It’s no less time consuming than the search for iron, and searching for paper ephemera and related newspapers in antique shops feels close to impossible sometimes. But once you start networking with local and national institutions who share a like-minded view on the past, it’s amazing. In my view it’s a lot more amazing than having 16 storage units filled with skillets you will only show to a select few people who you deem cool enough.
The history isn’t the iron itself–it’s the records of the lives of those who produced it. That’s far more important to me than spending $12,599 on a skillet (that just happened, as it turns out.).
Happy hunting, and when you find something new, lemme know! I’d love to have a look.
This here is William H. Terry. He was a moulder for the Barstow Stove Company. He started his apprenticeship in 1870 and went on to work for Pratt & Wentworth in Boston before returning to Barstow, where he trained apprentice moulders until 1883. If you have a Barstow piece, there’s a decent chance that this guy had a direct role in its casting. He wants you to learn more about the histories of foundries instead of spending 1/4 of his yearly salary on a frying pan.
