The standard behind every page.
Cast Iron Cookware is a citation-first reference: nothing here is asserted that a period document can't back up. This page explains how the research is done, what counts as evidence, and how confident you should be in any given fact.
A primary source — a document from the period itself — establishes a fact. Secondary sources (collector guides, forums, later histories) are treated only as leads: useful for pointing the way, but never the last word until a primary confirms them. Where the record is incomplete or the sources disagree, the page says so rather than papering over it.
The evidence here is drawn from the documents that made and sold these pans in their own day: manufacturers' and wholesalers' catalogs and price lists, trade journals, and patent and trademark records. Pre-1930 catalogs, patents, and gazettes are in the public domain, which is why they can be quoted and reproduced here in full.
Documents are read directly, not paraphrased from someone else's summary. Prices and specifications are image-verified against the scan — read off the page itself rather than trusted to optical character recognition, which garbles old type. Where a figure or date rests on an OCR'd or hard-to-read source, that uncertainty is flagged. Original diagrams reproduce no maker's logo or trademarked artwork.
If a page gets something wrong, or you have a period document — a catalog page, a dated ad, a patent — that would sharpen or correct an entry, please send it along. A citation you can point to is worth more than a confident guess, and this reference gets better every time a reader supplies one. Get in touch.
Every page is researched and written by a single collector who owns and uses pans like these — often a Griswold, Wagner, or Lodge. Read more about the author.