Anchor Hocking mark

How to read it

Anchor Hocking began in 1905, when Isaac J. Collins and six friends bought the Lancaster Carbon Company of Lancaster, Ohio, which had gone into receivership, and started the Hocking Glass Company, named after the nearby Hocking River (Anchor Hocking Glass Museum). On 31 December 1937 Hocking merged with the Anchor Cap and Closure Corporation to form the Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation. The anchor-H followed: the company registered it with the US Patent Office on 9 April 1940, claiming first use on 11 June 1938, and the registration says the mark was formed in the glass by pressing, according to Bill Lockhart and his colleagues in the Society for Historical Archaeology’s encyclopedia of glass marks. The same mark is found on the company’s Fire-King ovenware, alone or inside the Fire-King backstamps. Anchor Hocking LLC runs the company today; its website says the Anchor Hocking and Fire King names and logos are its trademarks, and that its glass is still made at the original Lancaster site.

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The marks before and after the anchor-H

The Anchor Hocking Glass Museum lists three marks: HG over Co from 1905 until 1937, the anchor over H from 1937 until 1968, and an anchor in a square from 1968, with a stylised anchor over H brought back in recent years. The Society for Historical Archaeology’s researchers date the change later. The anchor-H was still in published tables of trademarks in 1964 and 1971 and had gone by 1982, and a 75th-anniversary ashtray shows the next mark with the date 1980, so they give the anchor-H as 1938 to 1980. They add that the HG over CO mark sat in a shield and was almost certainly used only on tableware.

Owners since 1987

The museum’s history records that Newell bought the Anchor Hocking Corporation on 2 July 1987 and later sold it to Global Home Products, owned by Cerberus Capital Management. Global Home Products and Anchor Hocking filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2006, and the Anchor Hocking assets were sold to a unit of Monomoy Capital Partners. The website is operated today by Anchor Hocking LLC.

Marks mistaken for Anchor Hocking’s

The museum names three. The F in a shield is the mark of the Federal Glass Company, though it is often taken for Fire-King. A large H over a small A is the mark of Hazel-Atlas Glass. Anchor Glass Container, which now occupies many former Anchor Hocking plants, has a confusingly similar name and emblem; the Society for Historical Archaeology describes that company’s mark as an anchor that looks like two Gs back to back, which is really a stylised A and G.