Bogus Griswold #4?

My favorite skillet, for its size anyway, is a large slant logo Griswold #4 I bought on ebay for about $90, I think. It came in last year, well packed and looking beautiful, from a guy and his son that do a lot of these. It is conspicuously free of wear, which seems odd, but what my wife says is the clincher is this:

I accidentally knocked it off the wall, where it was hanging maybe 6.5 feet from the floor. It fell onto a wood parquet floor in the kitchen, right on the tip of the handle, and the handle broke off along with about one inch of the skillet wall. I should have stuck my foot out to break its fall. The seam where it broke looks very clean. It can even be glued back together to serve as an ornament if nothing else.

I really didn't suspect anything but my wife, who is Chinese and trained in science, asked "Is cast iron supposed to break when it falls on a wood floor? I think that's a Chinese fake."

Thoughts? Thanks.
 
The same properties that make CI hard also make it brittle. Heat warping notwithstanding, have you ever seen a bent piece of cast iron cookware?
 
Thanks, Doug. I see other admonishments on the internet about dropping skillets, and they feature photos of broken handles that look just like mine.
 
there are some 'fake' griswolds for sale on the internet... but from what I've seen they are very obvious... rough castings and the lettering isn't clear... if yours was a fake you would have known it before it broke.
 
Cast iron is very brittle. It breaks very easily. I sometimes sale skillets online and go to great measures when packing to make sure they don't break during shipping. It happens a lot out there. Most people are surprised to here this.
 
I have a Descoware maple leaves dutch oven, and it was broken during shipping. The handle just snapped off the dutch oven. Its bad news when they break, but I still use mine. The missing handle is like a steam release valve, lol.
 
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