A skillet from a dead company
In February 2025, at an auction in Millersburg, Ohio, a cast iron skillet sold for nine thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. F27
It was a Griswold, with the slanted ERIE logo and a heat ring on the bottom. F27
The company that poured it has not existed since 1957. F2
The name on it still exists — but today it is a trademark with a filing date and a registration number, and you cannot walk into the foundry that earned it, because that foundry closed before most of us were born. F5 F2
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One more thing before we start.
Three names, three endings
Three American names matter in this story, and they end in three different ways.
Griswold began in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1865, founded by Matthew Griswold and the Selden brothers. F1 Wagner began in 1891 in Sidney, Ohio, founded by two brothers, Milton and Bernard Wagner. F6 Lodge began in 1896 in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, in a foundry Joseph Lodge called Blacklock. F11
Ninety years later, two of those three had been sold, resold, and finally reduced to paperwork. The third is still owned and run by the founder's descendants. F11
That is the whole video in one sentence. Now the part that is worth your time: how the two got there, because it did not happen all at once, and because the pattern repeats in every episode on this list.
The year the buyer was the rival
Griswold was bought by McGraw-Edison in March 1957, and later the same year the brand and the housewares division were sold on to the Wagner Manufacturing Company, with the Erie plant closing permanently that December. F2
Read that again, because it is the moment everything turns. The buyer of Griswold was its own competitor. And what changed hands was not a factory that kept running: the factory shut, and what moved was the name.
Think about what that meant in Erie that winter. A works that had been pouring iron in that city since before the transcontinental railroad was finished stopped, and the thing the new owner wanted — the only thing worth paying for — was the word on the bottom of the pan. The moulds, the men who knew the sand, the finishing line: none of that was the asset. The asset was the reputation those things had built over ninety-two years, and reputations travel in a filing cabinet.
From there the name kept moving. In 1969 Textron sold both Wagner and Griswold to General Housewares Corporation, which made cookware under both names until the Griswold name was phased out in the early 1970s. F3 A collector-maintained archive of the trademark records puts the end of any use of the Griswold mark after 1973. F29
So for roughly thirty years, on the shelf, Griswold did not exist at all.
Then it came back as a registration. One GRISWOLD trademark for cast iron cookware was filed in November 2007 and registered in November 2009, covering skillets, griddles, dutch ovens, kettles, pots and pans — and it is on the register as renewed as of July 2020. F4 A second one, filed in August 2018 and registered in April 2020, is held by a company called Griswold Cast Iron Company, with an address in Erie, Pennsylvania. F5
Erie. The same city. The name has come home on paper, a hundred and sixty years after it started there and nearly seventy after the plant stopped. Somebody tried to have that second registration cancelled, and the proceeding is recorded as terminated in May 2025 — so the mark survived the challenge. F5
What we could not find is a company selling new Griswold skillets at scale. The main Griswold site you will reach online is an informational and collector site, and it recommends other brands to anyone who wants a new pan today. F33
The foundry that never reopened
Wagner's ending is different, and sadder, because there really was a factory until recently.
The ownership chain: from the Wagner family to the Randall Company in 1952, to Textron in 1959, to General Housewares in 1969, to the Slyman Group in 1996, and then to American Culinary Corporation of Willoughby, Ohio in 2000. F7 That last transfer happened after the previous owner fell into receivership, and American Culinary took both the Wagner and the Griswold marks. F9
The plant itself: the Sidney, Ohio foundry closed for a scheduled break in July 1999 and never reopened. The company went into receivership, and the building stood empty until it was demolished in 2023. F8 For years it sat there as one of those industrial ruins people photograph. F32
Then, in 2022, the name came back. A relaunch called Wagner Cast Iron began selling reissued vintage-pattern cookware, and descendants of the original Wagner family of Sidney joined the project in 2021. F10
We looked for where those new pans are actually cast, and the site does not say. So we are not going to tell you, because we do not know — and on this list, a thing we cannot source is a thing we do not claim.
The one that never sold
The ownership chain of both names, with every registration number and date, is on the site with the sources numbered. The link is below.
Now the third company, and the reason for the title.
Lodge has never been sold. It started in 1896, it is still owned and managed by descendants of the Lodge family, and the company's own history counts more than a hundred and twenty-five years of continuous operation. F11 F13 It has had one genuine disaster: the original Blacklock foundry burned down in 1910, and they rebuilt it. F12
What they have done recently is the opposite of what happened to the other two. In 2017 Lodge opened a second foundry in New Hope, Tennessee — a hundred and twenty-seven thousand square feet, raising production capacity by about seventy-five percent. F12 And in 2019 it bought FINEX of Portland, Oregon, the first time in a hundred and twenty-three years that Lodge had acquired an established cast iron company, moving FINEX castings toward Tennessee while the FINEX brand stayed in Portland. F15 F36
One company bought a competitor and kept both foundries running. The other, in 1957, bought a competitor and closed its plant within the year. F2 Same industry, same kind of transaction, opposite outcome — and that difference is what you are actually choosing between when you pick up a pan.
Why the old pan is smooth
Here is the thing everybody notices and almost nobody explains correctly.
An old American skillet has a cooking surface like glass. A new mass-market one arrives with a slightly pebbled, sandy texture. People will tell you this is because the old iron was better. It is not about the iron.
Sand casting leaves a rough surface, and it always did. What the old manufacturers added was a finishing step: hours of tumbling and hand polishing that ground the surface smooth before it left the building. In the middle of the twentieth century that step was dropped, to speed production up and cut costs, which is why modern pans come pre-seasoned over a raw sand finish. F26
So the smoothness you are admiring is labour. It was removed on purpose, by accountants, decades ago.
And you can watch someone put it back. Field Company describes exactly this: skilled workers machine each casting to remove excess material and create a level, smooth cooking surface — their own words for doing by machine what the old makers did by hand. F17 That is why a Field No. 8 costs a hundred and sixty-five dollars F18 and a Lodge ten-and-a-quarter-inch skillet costs between about thirty and thirty-seven. F14
Neither of those is the wrong price. They are two different products: one of them includes the finishing step, and one of them does not.
The names that left nothing
Griswold and Wagner at least left a trademark behind. Most of the others left nothing.
A cross-reference of American cast iron manufacturers lists the historic names beside the current ones, and the historic column is long: Favorite, Wapak, and others that were real foundries with real customers, and are now simply gone — no relaunch, no registration, no reissue. F31 If you own a pan with one of those names on the bottom, there is no company anywhere that can make you another.
Which raises a fair question: how is any of this knowable at all, when the companies that could answer have been dissolved for half a century?
The answer is that collectors did the archiving. A collector-maintained reference keeps the Wagner company's founding, its product lines and its ownership history as a historical record. F30 Another documents the trademark history in detail, including the awkward period when the Griswold mark appeared in modified form on Wagner-pattern pieces after the takeover. F29 Independent history pages corroborate the Griswold arc, from an Erie hardware maker to a cookware producer, F34 and a manufacturer dictionary records its status today: a defunct original maker whose pieces are collected rather than cooked on. F35
That is unusual, and worth saying plainly. On most of the subjects on this list the paper trail is corporate — filings, court records, press releases. Here a large part of what survives was kept by people who simply refused to let the information disappear along with the foundries. When you look up a pattern number tonight, that is whose work you are using.
Who pours iron in America today
If you want a new American pan, here is what the labels actually mean, brand by brand, from each company's own description.
Field Company, founded in 2016, pours at foundries in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, with green-sand casting and recycled iron, and machines and finishes in the United States. F16
Smithey, based in North Charleston, South Carolina, starts from raw castings made at outside foundries — one of them in Indiana — and then grinds, polishes, machines and seasons them by hand in Charleston. F20 Their No. 12 is two hundred and twenty dollars. F19
Stargazer pours in Wisconsin and Ohio, sends the castings to an Ohio machine shop, then to Allentown, Pennsylvania for inspection and hand finishing. F21 F38
Butter Pat started in Easton, Maryland in 2013 and was acquired by YETI, which shifted production toward a Wisconsin foundry. F22 F23
Marquette Castings went the other way from almost everyone: it used investment-casting foundries in China, and switched to RLM Industries in Oxford, Michigan, for quality reasons. F24
Borough Furnace, started in Syracuse, New York in 2011, pours and hand-finishes in small batches from recycled scrap iron — about six to seven hours of work per skillet — now based in Owego, New York. F25
There is one more on the list, and it is the smallest. FINEX of Portland started in 2012 and lasted seven years as an independent before Lodge bought it — which is either a failure or a success depending on what you think an independent foundry is for. F15
Notice the pattern. Almost none of these companies both pours and finishes in the same place. "Made in USA" on a modern artisan skillet usually means two states and two companies, and that is not a scandal — it is how small-batch casting works. But it is not the same sentence as "we own the foundry."
What to do with the pan you own
So what do you do with this?
If you already own an old American pan, you own the finishing step, and it is not coming back at that price. Clean it, keep it, cook on it. Its value as an object is real: the Millersburg auction that opened this video also sold a Griswold toy waffle iron for two thousand seven hundred dollars and a large-block-logo number thirteen for three thousand three hundred. F27 Collectors track those realised prices — one archive holds more than two and a half thousand recorded Griswold results. F28 But that is a collectors' market, not a cooking decision.
One more thing worth weighing if you are choosing between a big name and a small one. The trade press covering the FINEX deal in 2019 described the same plan the companies described: the castings consolidating into the Tennessee foundry while the Portland brand kept its own identity. F37 Two independent accounts of one transaction, and they agree. That is what a normal, still-functioning company looks like in the record — and it is a useful contrast with a name that changed hands six times and ended as a registration number.
If you are buying new, the honest question is not which name is oldest. It is which finish you want and where the iron is poured, and both answers are published by the companies themselves.
And if you are buying a name — a Griswold or a Wagner on something new — find out what you are paying for. In the Griswold case, the trademark and the foundry have not been in the same hands since 1957. F2 F5
Turn it over and look
Three foundries started within thirty years of each other in the eighteen hundreds. Two of them became trademarks, and one of those two had its building knocked down in 2023. F8 The third is still pouring, still family-owned, and spent 2017 building a second foundry. F12
The skillet in your kitchen is on one side of that story or the other, and the bottom of the pan usually tells you which.
And if it is an old one, remember what you are actually holding: not better iron, but paid-for labour that a company somewhere decided, one year in the middle of the last century, to stop paying for.
So turn it over and look. If there is a name under there you did not expect — or no name at all — tell us in the comments. We read them, and the good ones end up in the next video.
And if you want the rest of this list — the appliances, the tools, the brands that still mean a factory instead of a licence — subscribe. There is a new one every day.