About Steve's Seasoned Classics

A Private Collection of Ohio Cast Iron

The Iron Endures

Somewhere in Ohio, in the summer of 1863, a man named Barney Menke filed a patent for a new kind of tea kettle. A few months later — while Grant was moving on Vicksburg and Sherman was preparing for Atlanta — a foundry in Zanesville poured that design into iron and cast its name into the bottom: Shinnick Hattan & Co., June 23, 1863.

That kettle is here. You can see it. The casting date is still legible. The iron is still sound.

That’s what this museum is.

What You’ll Find Here

Steve’s Seasoned Classics is a private collection of more than 130 pieces of Ohio cast iron — tea kettles, skillets, waffle irons, bean pots, griddles, sad irons, and industrial pieces — made by Ohio foundries that no longer exist.

Most of the names on this iron won’t appear in any standard cast iron guide. They don’t belong to Griswold, Wagner, or Lodge. They belong to Greer & King of Dayton, Yourtee, Hollister & Co. of Cincinnati, Adams & Britt, Ahrens & Arnold, Shinnick Hattan & Co. of Zanesville. Firms that cast their names into iron sometime between the 1840s and 1905 and then disappeared — into bankruptcy, consolidation, fire, or simple time.

The iron survived. The names survived. This museum exists so the stories behind them don’t disappear too.

This Is Not a Research Database

SSC is a museum. It is not a cast-iron reference guide, a collector database, or a scholarly archive. If you arrived looking for a comprehensive list of Ohio foundries, a catalog of pattern numbers, or an academic citation — this isn’t that place, and we’re not trying to be.

We are a place to encounter remarkable objects and understand what they meant.

Every piece on this site was made by real people, in a real Ohio town, for real American households. Behind each name on the iron, there is a partnership, a patent, a city block, a year. The museum tells those stories — not because they belong in a footnote, but because they belong in front of people who might never have thought about where their cast iron came from.

You don’t need to be a collector to be here. You don’t need to know what a gate mark is or why a heat ring matters. You just need to be curious about the objects that built American kitchens.

The Collection

The SSC collection spans more than 50 confirmed Ohio makers and covers the full geographic range of Ohio’s industrial era — from Cincinnati’s riverfront foundries in the southwest to the agricultural implement makers of Bryan in the far northwest, from the pottery and iron towns of Zanesville in the east to the cookware works of Sidney, Piqua, and Wapakoneta in the west.

It includes the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The ordinary: a $6 Wagner skillet picked up from a Goodwill auction because it completed a set. A Lodge lot from a church rummage sale. Cast iron that was never meant to be rare and isn’t — it was just made to cook.

The extraordinary: a complete production run of Wagner Ware Sidney-O skillets, No. 0 through No. 14 — every size the Sidney foundry produced, gathered from across the country over months of searching. A Martin cast iron No. 14 skillet with the hamburger logo, one of the most sought-after pieces in American cast iron. A Wapak Indian Head skillet from Wapakoneta, Ohio, was made by a foundry that operated for only 23 years before going bankrupt in 1926.

And the pieces that belong in neither category — the ones that required original research to identify at all. A bean pot tied to a Dayton patent filed in 1868. A tea kettle whose maker turns out to have licensed the same design to four other foundries across Ohio and Indiana. A smelting ladle with its original foundry slag still preserved in the pour cup, exactly as it left the foundry floor.

Those are the pieces SSC exists to document and display.

The Stories Behind the Iron

Each piece in the collection has a dedicated page on this site. Not a data entry — a story.

You’ll find out who made it, where, and roughly when. You’ll find out what happened to the company that cast it. You’ll find the patent, if there is one, and what the inventor claimed. You’ll find where the piece was acquired and its condition when it arrived.

Some of those stories are short because the historical record is thin. Some are long because the iron led somewhere unexpected — into the 1863 Cincinnati patent network, into the Ohio State Penitentiary’s hollow ware contracts, into the family succession of a Zanesville foundry across three generations of a single surname.

Where the record runs out, that’s stated plainly. SSC does not speculate beyond the evidence. If we don’t know, we say we don’t know.

How the Pieces Are Cared For

Every piece that enters the SSC collection is treated as what it is: a historical object whose surface is itself part of the record.

The museum follows a preservation-first conservation doctrine. No grinding, no sanding, no power tools, no metal removal. Pieces with original patina, thermal deposits, or foundry evidence are preserved exactly as found and finished with SSC Archival Black™ — a museum display seasoning formulated for presentation and long-term stability. It is not a cooking finish. It is not food-safe. It is designed to present the iron in its fullest visual expression without altering what it has to say.

Pieces intended for active cooking use receive SSC Chef’s Formula™, a cook-ready seasoning developed through extensive testing. Storage and display pieces receive SSC Heritage Blend™, a protective coating of beeswax and coconut oil for long-term moisture protection.

Museum pieces in the collection receive Renaissance Wax — the conservation standard used by institutions worldwide — where appropriate for long-term storage or institutional loan.

Historic objects deserve historic care.

The Books

The research behind this collection has grown into two book-length projects, both of which are forthcoming in October 2026 from Steve’s Seasoned Classics Press.

The Kettle and the War* traces the Shinnick Hattan & Co. tea kettle — the oldest datable piece in the collection, cast June 23, 1863 — back through the patent that created it, into the network of Ohio foundries that licensed and competed over the same design during the Civil War years, and forward through the industrial transformation that ended most of them by 1905. It is a book about a kettle, and about what Ohio made, and about the people who made it.

The Road from Nellinghof* is a six-century family history — the Thaman and Brandewie lines from medieval Westphalia through the Thirty Years’ War, the transatlantic emigration of the 1830s, and the settlement of Ohio’s Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches. It ends with Henry Joseph Thaman and Cecelia Brandewei, the grandparents to whom this museum is dedicated.

Both will be released as free public-domain PDFs.

A Note on How This Site Was Built

SSC uses AI tools in the writing and organization of this site — for drafting, structuring, and editorial support. Every piece in the collection was personally acquired, examined, and attributed by Steve Thaman before any text was written about it. Every historical claim rests on a physical object, a named source, or both. Where the record is incomplete, that limitation is stated in the piece’s entry.

The iron is the authority here, not the prose.

The Dedication

Steve’s Seasoned Classics is dedicated to the memory of Henry J. and Cecilia Brandewei Thaman — Steve’s grandparents, whose roots trace through the German Catholic farming communities of Mercer, Auglaize, and Shelby counties in western Ohio, the Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches.

All future museum donations will be credited permanently to their descendants.

What Comes Next

The collection is growing. New pieces are acquired regularly, and each one receives its own page before it’s considered part of the museum.

The Ohio Foundry Directory — a geographic index of Ohio’s cast iron makers organized by city and region, not alphabetically — is planned for public release in October 2026, alongside the two books and a series of free identification and preservation guides.

Once the collection is complete, the entire archive — the iron, the research, the photography, the documentation — will be donated intact to an Ohio institution, where it will remain accessible to anyone who seeks it.

The iron endures. The markings tell the truth. The story deserves to be told.