Fiesta marks

How to read it

Fiesta came out in 1936 as cheap, attractive dinnerware in the streamlined Art Deco style, made by the Homer Laughlin China Company and designed by its art director, Frederick Hurten Rhead, who had joined the company in 1927 (e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia). In the 1940s, e-WV says, 2,500 workers made 30 million pieces a year. Production stopped in 1973. The company brought Fiesta back in March 1986 in a vitrified, lead-safe body and new colours: white, black, cobalt, rose and apricot, in the maker's own timeline. In 2020 Steelite International bought Homer Laughlin's foodservice divisions and the Homer Laughlin and Hall China brand names, and the company that kept making dinnerware for the home was renamed The Fiesta Tableware Company (the maker's timeline; e-WV). The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes the maker instead as a division of Steelite.

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Impressed in the mold or stamped in ink

How the mark gets onto a piece depends on how the piece is made, the Fiesta Tableware Company explains. Hollow pieces such as mugs, bowls, pitchers and vases are formed in a mold with the mark carved into it, so the mark is impressed. Plates are made differently and can't take an impressed mark, so they get an ink stamp, applied to the unfired piece beneath the glaze, which is hard to see on some dark glazes. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, records both kinds on early Fiesta: a 1936 bowl impressed fiesta / MADE IN / USA / HLCo, and a 1936 plate stamped in blue GENUINE / fiesta [in script] / H . L . Co USA. The maker adds that a plate with no stamp is not unusual, particularly in Fiesta made before 1973.

The colours and their years

The colour of a piece narrows its date, and e-WV gives the order: red, yellow, cobalt blue, green and old ivory in 1936; turquoise in 1937; forest green, rose, chartreuse and grey in 1951; medium green in 1959; antique gold, turf green and mango red (a reproduction of the original red) in 1969. Since 1986 colours have been introduced and retired every few years; the maker counts Mulberry, in 2018, as its 50th. Accounts of the launch differ slightly: e-WV says Fiesta began with four colours and then names five for 1936, and its Homer Laughlin entry describes red, blue, green and yellow with ivory added soon after; WV Living gives red, green, ivory, cobalt and yellow.

Other Homer Laughlin marks

Rhead also designed Virginia Rose and Harlequin, which e-WV calls a colourful successor to Fiesta. e-WV adds that a diner turning over a plate almost anywhere in the United States is likely to find the Homer Laughlin fleur-de-lis or another of the company's marks. Homer Laughlin's first pottery, the Ohio Valley Pottery at East Liverpool, made ironstone china until 1877.