Griswold Cast Iron: Erie's Kitchen Legacy

If you have ever used a cast iron skillet, there is a decent chance you know the name Griswold. If you collect vintage cookware, there is a very good chance you have spent real money trying to find one. And the company that made them, for nearly a century, operated right here in Erie.

The Selden-Griswold Manufacturing Company was founded in eighteen sixty-five by Matthew Griswold and his cousins, the brothers J.C. and Samuel Selden. They started with hardware products, separable butt hinges, tobacco cutters, and a patented wheeled spittoon, before finding their true calling in cast iron cookware in the eighteen eighties and nineties.

What made Griswold cookware exceptional was the quality of the machining. The company's foundrymen ground and buffed the cooking surfaces to a smoothness that mass-market competitors could not match. A Griswold skillet from the early twentieth century has a cooking surface that feels more like polished steel than rough iron, and it maintains that quality a hundred years later. The company moved to larger premises at Twelfth and Raspberry Streets in nineteen-oh-three, and at its peak employed hundreds of Erie workers churning out skillets, Dutch ovens, waffle irons, and griddles that were shipped across the country.

The decline came in the nineteen forties. Competition from aluminum and stainless steel, internal labor disputes, and shifting management eroded the company's edge. The Griswold family sold in nineteen forty-six. A series of acquisitions followed, and in December of nineteen fifty-seven the Erie plant closed for good.

Today, a piece marked with the Griswold diamond logo might sell for dozens or even hundreds of dollars at auction. Collectors drive across the country to visit the Hagen History Center here in Erie, which holds one of the most significant Griswold collections anywhere. Matthew Griswold made hardware; his descendants made heirlooms.