Favorite Piqua Ware No. 7 Skillet
SSC MUSEUM COLLECTION
Catalog No. SSC-FPW-SKL-7-Smiley-001
Smiley Face Logo | Double Dot Molder’s Mark | Piqua, Ohio
Circa 1916–1935 • Favorite Stove & Range Co.
Bottom view showing the Favorite Piqua Ware Smiley logo at 12 o’clock, size number “7” at 6 o’clock, and the distinctive double dot molder’s mark below.
This Favorite Piqua Ware No. 7 skillet carries something most cast iron pieces do not—a direct, personal mark from the foundry worker who cast it. Below the size number “7” on the bottom of the pan, two small raised dots sit side by side, barely noticeable unless you know to look. These are molder’s marks: tiny signatures pressed into the sand mold by an individual foundryman at the Piqua plant before the molten iron was ever poured.
In an era when foundry workers were paid by the piece, these marks served a practical purpose—they allowed foremen to tally each worker’s daily production and, critically, to trace any quality defects back to the person responsible. A skillet that came out of the mold with a crack, a rough surface, or a misaligned casting could be identified by its molder’s mark and the issue addressed. The double dot on this No. 7 is not a flaw, not a random casting artifact, and not a pattern letter—it is the deliberate mark of a human hand, pressed into damp sand inside the Favorite Stove & Range foundry on College Street in Piqua, Ohio, sometime between 1916 and 1935.
The No. 7 itself occupies an interesting place in the Favorite Piqua Ware lineup. Slightly larger than the No. 6 but not quite the full-family No. 8, the No. 7 was a versatile pan for households cooking for two to three people—ideal for a generous portion of fried chicken, a skillet of cornbread, or a pan full of breakfast potatoes. At approximately 10 inches across the cooking surface, it offered enough room for serious cooking without the weight penalty of the larger sizes.
Piece Details
Close-up of the Smiley logo and markings. Note the two small raised dots positioned just below the size number “7”—a molder’s mark identifying the individual foundry worker who cast this piece.
Manufacturer
Favorite Stove & Range Co.
Brand
Favorite Piqua Ware
Piece Type
Skillet
Size Number
No. 7
Logo Variant
Smiley Face Logo
Special Markings
Double dot molder’s mark below size number
Approximate Dimensions
10” diameter × 14” overall length × 2” deep
Date of Manufacture
Circa 1916–1935
Place of Manufacture
Piqua, Miami County, Ohio
Condition
Sits flat, no cracks, no chips, fully seasoned
Acquisition Date
November 26, 2025
Acquisition Source
Etsy — Seller: CastAndClaraBell
Transaction Number
4833277958
Order Number
3875590678
Purchase Price
$155.00 item + $13.11 shipping + $14.25 tax = $182.36 total
SSC Catalog Number
SSC-FPW-SKL-7-Smiley-001
The Double Dot: A Foundry Worker’s Signature
The two small raised dots below the “7” on this skillet are what collectors and foundry historians call molder’s marks. Unlike the incised markings that were part of the pattern itself—the Smiley logo, the size number, the brand name—molder’s marks were added individually by the foundry worker at the moment of casting. They are raised rather than recessed because they were created by pressing a small tool—likely the tip of a nail, a punch, or a purpose-made stamp—into the damp sand mold before pouring the iron. When the sand was packed around the pattern and the pattern removed, the indentation left in the sand became a small raised bump on the finished casting.
The practice was widespread across American foundries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As documented by the Cast Iron Collector reference site, foundrymen were typically paid by the piece—a system known as piecework—and their individual marks served dual purposes. First, they allowed foremen to count each worker’s daily output for payroll. Second, and perhaps more importantly for quality control, they made it possible to trace a defective casting back to the specific molder responsible. If a batch of skillets emerged from the cooling line with rough surfaces, cracks, or misaligned features, the molder’s mark told the foundry exactly whose technique needed correction.
Different foundries and different workers used different marking systems. Some molders used their initials—a single raised letter or pair of letters. Others used numbers, which may have indicated a shift rather than an individual. And some, as we see on this No. 7, used dots or patterns of dots. The Cast Iron Collector notes that “some makers appear to have used a dot or multiple dots in similar fashion” to letters and numbers for quality tracking. A single dot might identify one worker; a double dot, another; three dots arranged in a triangle, a third. The system only needed to be unique within a given shift at a given foundry—it did not need to be standardized across the industry.
What makes the double dot on this No. 7 particularly compelling for SSC’s museum mission is what it represents: direct physical evidence of the individual human labor behind every piece of vintage cast iron. The Smiley logo tells us the company. The size number tells us the product. But the double dot tells us something more personal—that a specific person, whose name we will almost certainly never know, stood at a molding station inside the Favorite Stove & Range foundry on College Street, packed sand around a pattern, pressed two small indentations into the mold with a tool, and then watched as molten iron was poured into the cavity he had prepared. That individual act of craftsmanship, repeated hundreds of times per shift, produced the skillet we hold today.
The seller, Cast & Clara Bell, specifically called out the double dot in the listing title—“Smiley Logo and double dot marking”—recognizing that knowledgeable collectors value these marks as evidence of authentic hand-production methods. In an era before automated molding machines, every cast iron skillet was made by hand, one mold at a time. The double dot is proof of that process.
Profile view showing the smooth bottom (no heat ring), thin walls, and the characteristic Favorite Piqua Ware handle proportions.
The Company: From Cincinnati to “The Favorite City”
The story of this skillet begins not in Piqua, but in Cincinnati. In 1848, William C. Davis founded W.C. Davis & Company, a stove and hollow ware manufacturer on the banks of the Ohio River. After the Civil War, the firm reorganized as Great Western Stove Works. In 1872, a young industrialist named William King Boal purchased partial ownership of the company, and by 1880 he had assumed full control, renaming it Favorite Stove Works.
Boal was an ambitious industrialist. When the Piqua Board of Trade came calling in 1886 with an extraordinary offer—eight free acres of land, eight new brick factory buildings, free natural gas for ten years, and tax exemptions—Boal signed on. Production began on February 25, 1889, with over 250 employees working in eight buildings on College Street.
The impact on Piqua was immediate and profound. The company became the city’s largest manufacturer. The community became known as “The Favorite City.” Workers settled on the hill west of the factory on what became known as “Stove Works Hill,” where generations of families would make their living in the foundry. The molder who pressed two dots into this skillet’s sand mold was one of those workers—likely a resident of Stove Works Hill, walking to work each morning at the plant that defined his community.
William King Boal died on January 2, 1916 at age 84. His son, William Stanhope Boal, succeeded him as president and significantly expanded the production of hollow ware—the cast iron cookware we collect today. Under his leadership, the Smiley logo became the company’s signature mark, appearing across the full range of skillets, Dutch ovens, and specialty pieces.
The Great Depression hit the company hard. William Stanhope Boal died on December 17, 1933. The firm reorganized under William C. Katker, who became the fourth company president, but it was too late. In 1935, the Favorite Stove & Range Company was liquidated. Foster Stove Company of Ironton, Ohio purchased the patents, patterns, dies, and trademarks—but the Piqua foundry never produced another piece.
The Smiley Logo: Favorite’s Most Beloved Mark
Favorite Stove & Range used approximately eight different logos on its cookware over the years. The earliest pieces bear a simple block letter trademark, and the consensus among collectors and researchers places the Smiley logo in the later period of production—roughly 1916 through 1935—making it a product of the William Stanhope Boal era.
The Smiley logo features “FAVORITE” arched across the top in an elegant serif font, with “PIQUA” centered below it, and “WARE” beneath that. What gives the logo its nickname is the graceful curved line beneath “WARE” that resembles a subtle smile. The overall impression is warm and inviting—a piece of early 20th-century brand identity that still charms collectors a century later.
On this No. 7, the Smiley logo is positioned at the 12 o’clock position on the bottom of the pan, with the size number “7” cast below at approximately the 6 o’clock position and the double dot molder’s mark just below that. The casting is clean and well-defined, with all three lines of the logo clearly legible.
The Favorite Family: Four Brands, One Foundry
What many casual collectors do not realize is that Favorite Piqua Ware was only one of several brand names produced under the Favorite Stove & Range umbrella. The complete family includes four distinct brands:
Favorite Piqua Ware — The flagship brand. Premium quality hollow ware bearing the company’s own name, produced under various logos including the block letter, stylized, and Smiley variants.
Columbus Hollow Ware (“The Favorite”) — A subsidiary operation producing skillets marked “The Favorite” in Columbus, Ohio from approximately 1882 to 1902.
Miami — The budget-friendly brand, marked with a distinctive diamond logo containing the word “MIAMI.” Named after Miami County, where Piqua is located.
Puritan — A private-label brand manufactured for Sears, Roebuck & Co. These pieces were sold through the Sears catalog, bringing Favorite’s casting quality to a nationwide retail audience.
The Steve’s Seasoned Classics museum collection includes documented pieces from all four of these brands—a distinction we believe makes SSC the first and only online resource to present the complete Favorite family under one roof.
Physical Characteristics & Construction
Favorite Piqua Ware skillets are consistently praised by collectors for their light weight, thin walls, and smooth cooking surfaces—qualities that place them in the same conversation as Griswold and Wagner. The No. 7 exemplifies these traits beautifully.
The cooking surface is smooth and well-seasoned, the result of careful finishing at the foundry combined with over a century of use. Unlike modern cast iron, which is often left with a rough, pebbly texture from the casting sand, Favorite’s pieces were ground and polished to create a surface that develops a superb non-stick seasoning with use.
This particular No. 7 does not feature a raised heat ring on the bottom, placing it among the later production pieces designed for use on gas and electric ranges rather than the flat cooking eyes of wood- and coal-burning stoves. The absence of a heat ring, combined with the Smiley logo, suggests manufacture in the later years of the 1916–1935 production window, as the company adapted its designs to the modernizing American kitchen.
The handle features the characteristic Favorite Piqua Ware teardrop-shaped hanging hole, and the pan has dual pour spouts—one on each side of the rim—a standard feature across the product line that allowed both right- and left-handed cooks to pour easily.
Top view showing the smooth, well-seasoned cooking surface with dual pour spouts and teardrop hanging hole.
Understanding Molder’s Marks: What the Research Tells Us
The study of molder’s marks is one of the less-documented areas of cast iron collecting, in part because these marks were never intended for the consumer—they were internal foundry tools. But for researchers and museum curators, they offer a rare window into the daily operations of American foundries.
According to the Cast Iron Collector, the authoritative reference site for vintage cast iron identification, molder’s marks are distinguished from maker’s marks by how they were created. Maker’s marks—logos, size numbers, brand names—were incised into the pattern itself, meaning they appeared on every piece cast from that pattern. Molder’s marks, by contrast, were added to the sand mold at the time of individual casting. Because they were pressed into the sand (creating a void), they appear as raised features on the finished iron—the opposite of the incised maker’s marks.
The piecework payment system that drove molder’s marks was standard practice in American foundries. A skilled molder working at the Favorite plant might produce dozens of skillets in a single shift, each one requiring the creation of a new sand mold, the packing of sand around the pattern, the careful removal of the pattern, the addition of his personal mark, and the pouring of molten iron. Speed mattered—more pieces meant more pay—but so did quality, because defective castings were traced back through the marks and rejected pieces meant lost wages.
The double dot format seen on this No. 7 is less common than letter-based molder’s marks but well-documented in the collector community. Different dot patterns—single, double, triple, arranged horizontally or in triangles—allowed multiple molders working the same shift to differentiate their output without needing to create letter stamps. The simplicity of dots also made them faster to apply, which mattered when a worker’s income depended on the number of molds he completed per day.
For Steve’s Seasoned Classics, documenting molder’s marks is part of a broader commitment to preserving the complete story of each piece—not just who manufactured it and when, but how it was made and by whom. The double dot on this No. 7 connects a specific skillet to a specific moment in the Piqua foundry: one worker, one mold, one pour, one skillet that survived a century to reach this collection.
Collector’s Context
The No. 7 is a moderately uncommon size in the Favorite Piqua Ware Smiley lineup. While the No. 3, No. 5, and No. 8 appear most frequently on the secondary market, the No. 7 surfaces with less regularity. The addition of the double dot molder’s mark makes this particular example even more distinctive—a feature that knowledgeable collectors specifically seek out as evidence of authentic hand-production methods.
The acquisition price of $155.00 from Cast & Clara Bell, a respected Etsy seller specializing in professionally restored vintage cast iron, reflects both the desirability of the No. 7 size and the premium that the double dot marking commands among informed buyers. Cast & Clara Bell’s listing specifically highlighted the double dot as a notable feature, recognizing its significance to the collecting community.
In the Steve’s Seasoned Classics collection, this No. 7 joins Smiley-logo siblings across multiple sizes, contributing to what we believe is one of the most comprehensive documented Favorite Piqua Ware collections available online. It is the only piece in the SSC collection currently known to bear a molder’s mark, making it a uniquely important artifact for understanding the human labor behind Favorite’s production.
Provenance & Acquisition
This No. 7 skillet was acquired on November 26, 2025, via Etsy from seller CastAndClaraBell, under Etsy order number 3875590678 (transaction 4833277958). The listing described it as “So unique! 1930’s Favorite Piqua Ware #7 Cast Iron Skillet, Smiley Logo and double dot marking.” The total acquisition cost was $182.36, comprising $155.00 for the item, $13.11 for USPS Parcel Select Ground shipping, and $14.25 in sales tax. The piece arrived professionally restored, well-packed, and in the condition described: no cracks, no chips, sits flat on all surfaces, with a well-established seasoning, a crisp Smiley logo, and the distinctive double dot molder’s mark clearly visible below the size number.
Corporate Timeline: From W.C. Davis to Liquidation
1848
William C. Davis founds W.C. Davis & Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, manufacturing stoves and hollow ware.
1865
After the Civil War, the firm reorganizes as Great Western Stove Works.
1872
William King Boal purchases partial ownership of Great Western Stove Works.
1880
Boal assumes full control after Davis’s retirement, renames the company Favorite Stove Works.
1881
The Favorite Stove Works Company is formally organized with Boal as President and Samuel P. Cheseldine as Secretary and Treasurer.
1882
Columbus Hollow Ware Company begins operations, producing skillets marked “The Favorite.”
1886
Boal signs contract with the Piqua Board of Trade to relocate the foundry.
1889
Favorite Stove & Range Company of Piqua, Ohio begins production on February 25 with 250+ employees in eight brick buildings on College Street.
1893
Stanhope Boal registers the “Favorite” trademark.
1896
Workforce exceeds 300; annual production surpasses 50,000 stoves.
1902
Columbus Hollow Ware Company ceases operations.
1916
William King Boal dies January 2 at age 84. His son William Stanhope Boal succeeds him and expands hollow ware production significantly.
1919
A labor strike lasting eleven days hits the plant, with workers demanding a 25% wage increase.
1923
William Stanhope Boal becomes Chairman of the Board.
1928
William C. Katker becomes the fourth company president.
1933
William Stanhope Boal dies December 17. The Great Depression devastates sales.
1935
Favorite Stove & Range is liquidated. Foster Stove Company of Ironton, Ohio purchases patents, patterns, dies, and trademarks.
Why This Piece Matters
Most vintage cast iron tells us about companies. This piece tells us about a person.
The Smiley logo tells us this skillet was made by the Favorite Stove & Range Company in Piqua, Ohio. The size number tells us it was a No. 7, cast for a specific purpose in a specific era. The smooth bottom tells us it was made for modern stoves, dating it to the later years of production. But the double dot—those two tiny raised marks below the “7”—tells us something that no logo, no pattern number, and no corporate record can: that a specific human being made this exact skillet.
We do not know his name. We do not know if he was a young apprentice or a veteran molder. We do not know if he lived on Stove Works Hill or walked in from another part of Piqua. We do not know how many skillets he cast that day, or whether this was the first of his shift or the last. What we know is that he pressed two dots into a sand mold, and roughly a century later, those dots survive—a whisper from the foundry floor that outlasted the foundry itself.
Every piece in the Steve’s Seasoned Classics collection tells a story. This one tells the story of the workers who made American cast iron possible—not the owners, not the investors, not the salesmen, but the men who stood at the molding stations, packed sand, poured iron, and signed their work with nothing more than a pair of dots in damp sand.
The iron endures. The dots endure. The story deserves to be told.
Sources & Further Reading
CastIronCollector.com — “Numbers & Letters” reference page: molder’s marks, pattern letters, and quality control systems.
CastIronCollector.com — “Myths & Misconceptions”: clarification on raised marks vs. incised marks and molder identification.
CastIronCollector.com — Favorite Stove & Range Co. reference page and collector forums.
MentalScoop.com — “Decoding Cast Iron Numbers and Lettering”: detailed analysis of molder’s marks and piecework payment systems.
BoonieHicks.com — “Guide to Favorite Piqua Ware: Favorite Stove and Range Co.”
CastIronCanada.com — “Favorite Stove and Range History” — primary source research on W.C. Davis lineage.
Piqua Public Library Local History Department — “Favorite Stove” historical article, including Lois J. Fair contributions.
1909 History of Miami County, Ohio — Troy Historical Society biography entry for the Favorite Stove & Range Co.
CastAndClaraBell.com — Original listing description and markings analysis for this piece.
About Steve’s Seasoned Classics
Steve’s Seasoned Classics is an online museum dedicated to preserving and documenting the heritage of American cast iron cookware, with a focus on Ohio foundry pieces from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The SSC collection features over 60 pieces with detailed provenance, historical research, and photography for each item.
