Identify old Lodge??

I have an old skillet with a number 8 on top of the handle , it has an outside heat ring, one spout is a little larger than the other , it has resemblance to a Lodge Black lock 1900-1910 but does NOT have raised mark on the bottom, I hope I did the pix right, and any help would be great , thanks in advance
 

Attachments

  • ci.jpg
    ci.jpg
    35.3 KB · Views: 115
  • ci2.jpg
    ci2.jpg
    43.1 KB · Views: 151
The bottom of the handle doesn't look like the Blacklock I've seen in photos. The raised 8 also looks less distinct than those others as well. Is that something unusual in the heat ring at 5:30-6:00 or is it just the photo?
 
it is a crack looks like, here is a better pic of the bottom of the handle, I can find no pix of blacklocks to compare it to just documents thanks
 

Attachments

  • ci3.jpg
    ci3.jpg
    50.6 KB · Views: 88
If we are to go by what the RB shows as a Blacklock, they have 1) an outside heat ring, 2) a raised size number on the top of the handle, as did early Lodge, 3) a molder's mark at 6 o'clock perhaps a little but not much larger than those seen on early Lodge, and 4) a rib on the bottom of the handle that is distinctively flattened off to about halfway down. There seems to be a tendency on the part of some to want to make any skillet with outside heat ring, raised size number on top and any raised molder's marks at 6 a Blacklock. I think it's still easier to definitely say what is not Blacklock than to say what definitely is. So, yours could be 1) an unusual example of a Blacklock, or 2) by an unknown foundry, not Blacklock, or 3) a pan made perhaps using a Blacklock skillet as a pattern.

If we had some skillets we felt strongly were Blacklock and could compare side-by-side with yours, we might be able to conclude yours is one also, but one that happens to have no molder's mark. The one thing that I keep looking at on yours, however, that's making me lean away rather than towards is the numeral 8 doesn't look like any I've seen on skillets purported to be Blacklock-- yours appears flat, and with the top and bottom of it the same size. The Blacklock and later Lodge raised numerals are more convex, if that's the right word, and the top of a numeral 8 is slightly smaller than the bottom.
 
Doug, I have not taken time to look at and collect a lot of Lodge skillets. They can be nice pans but there are others nicer so my experience with them is limited. I have looked over Tim Mummert's article on Blacklock and Lodge. It looks like he has combined the article to include both. Wish we could all sit down with piles of old Lodge and supposedly Blacklock skillets and see if we can make any sense out of them. The grinding or surface treatment shown in Tim's article all look very similar and, while there are differences among the handles, top and bottom, that's true, too, of Griswold. Prior to reading Tim's work I would have thrown up my hands and said, "hell, I have no idea what a Blacklock skillet looks like". The red and blue books I feel only touch on makers other than Gris and Wag and, without some kind of idea of how or why the authors picked some dates and pans and labeled them as such and such, I just don't know. Jury is out on the Blacklock skillets for me at the present but it seems quite plausible what Tim has written and shown. He has a number of "variations" but, to me at a quick glance, I'm not sure how I would separate each variation from each other. Even in Erie variations I gave up after the third variation and lumped them mostly together for my collecting pleasure as "all the later ERIE skillets". To sum up my thoughts, Tim seems to have made some good picks in his article although he does not seem to separate Lodge from Blacklock.
 
Currently it is on the members only part of the Wagner and Griswold Society's website. How to find it there I don't know as I am not a member.
 
Back
Top