McCoy marks

How to read it

Nelson McCoy Sr., with his father J.W. McCoy and five stockholders, set up the Nelson McCoy Sanitary and Stoneware Company in Roseville, Ohio, in 1910 to make stoneware, the McCoy Pottery Collectors’ Society records. For its first years it didn't mark its wares, and from 1918 to January 1926 it sold through the American Clay Products Company, a cooperative of eleven stoneware potteries whose policy was not to mark products. Marks began around 1927. The pottery became the Nelson McCoy Pottery Co. in 1933. It was sold to the Mount Clemens Pottery Company in 1967, to the Lancaster Colony Corporation in 1974 and to Designer Accents in 1985, and closed in the fall of 1990. On a museum piece the full name reads ZANESVILLE-OHIO / NELSON McCoy POTTERY / USA (Zanesville Museum of Art). The company never registered the name. The collectors’ society has followed the applications at the US Patent and Trademark Office since: Designer Accents applied in 1989 and again in 1998; Roger Jensen of Rockwood, Tennessee, applied in 1992 to use McCoy on pottery he made, giving January 1991 as his first use; Rosella Martin of Century, Florida, applied in 1999. All were cancelled or abandoned by 2001, and the society found no active application for the single word McCoy on pottery after that; in 2003 Avon Jensen applied for JENSEN MCCOY USA.

Also searched as: brush mccoy, mccoy mark, mccoy pottery marks, nelson mccoy.

McCoy marks by owner

The collectors’ society sets out the order. The earliest marks, from the late 1920s, were incised, with one blue ink stamp, and some had a number giving the size. In the mid-1930s the designer Sidney Cope introduced the incised initials NM, for Nelson McCoy. The name McCoy came in next: the society dates the stylised McCoy to Cope's design of 1936 in one article and to the early 1940s in another. It appears as McCoy, McCoy USA and McCoy Made in USA, first incised and later embossed, and these marks ran until the late 1960s. Mount Clemens used marks without the name at first, in 1967, and brought McCoy back in a new design in 1968. Lancaster Colony returned to the 1940s style and added its initials, LCC, usually with USA. Under Designer Accents, which sold the ware as Nelson McCoy Ceramics, the name was again absent from the mark. Throughout, many pieces were unmarked or marked only USA, and older shapes kept their old marks until they were dropped, so pieces from the same year carry different marks.

Special marks

A gold ink stamp reading 24 K GOLD was added in 1957 to pieces with a fired-on gold coating, beside the usual McCoy mark. Pieces made under contract for other companies, such as CitroRamics, Esmond and Buckingham Ceramics, carry those companies' names. Roseville Floraline, a line for florists begun in June 1960, has its own Floraline mark, which changed under Mount Clemens and again under Lancaster Colony; it has nothing to do with the Roseville Pottery.

J.W. McCoy and Brush-McCoy

J.W. McCoy's own pottery in Roseville, established in September 1899 by the society's account, was a different company. Its art lines were marked with the line's name rather than the maker's, among them Loy-Nel-Art, which the Zanesville Museum of Art says is named for J.W. McCoy's three sons, Lloyd, Nelson and Arthur. In November 1911 George Brush became its majority stockholder and in December it was renamed the Brush-McCoy Pottery Co. Brush-McCoy marked much of its ware with an incised style number, and its name appears in only one published mark, an ink stamp on the 1916 Vogue line. The McCoy name was dropped in December 1925, when it became the Brush Pottery Company. The dates for J.W. McCoy differ between accounts: the society gives 1899, the museum's record heads the firm 1886–1910 and gives 1899 in its text, and Antique Trader gives 1848, the year of J.W. McCoy's birth in the museum's record.