The skillet your grandmother used every day is worth more than your first car. Last month, a black cast iron pan nearly identical to the one in your kitchen cabinet sold at auction in Indiana for $9,750. You have been frying eggs in a piece of American history without knowing it. You remember it by the weight.
Your mother lifted it off the stove with two hands and your father flipped bacon in it on Saturday mornings, turning the heat up too high, leaving brown edges on the eggs. The skillet sat on the back burner like it owned the stove. It was black in a way that nothing else was black, not painted, not coated, but black the way something gets after 50 years of bacon grease and Sunday mornings. She made cornbread on Wednesdays, pork chops on Thursdays, fried chicken after church.
The pan survived the move from the old house to the new one in 1959, carried in the front seat of the car like a passenger. It survived your older brother dropping it on the kitchen floor at midnight. The handle did not break. The floor cracked.
The pan was fine. It survived the year your parents almost split up, sitting on the burner through three months of quiet, waiting, and when your mother came back to the kitchen, the first thing she reached for was that skillet. Nobody knew how old it was. Your mother got it from her mother, who might have gotten it from hers.
It was already old when your parents married, already seasoned, already black. It came with the family the way recipes came, handed down silently, one woman giving it to the next and saying, “You will need this. ”
If you turn it over, you will find raised letters in the iron: a cross inside a circle and underneath it, two words, ERIE PA. Those words point to a place where a man built something that outlasted everything he ever touched.
His name was Matthew Griswold. In 1865, two years after Gettysburg, he walked away from a farm in Connecticut and moved to Erie. He started making door hinges in a building everyone called the butt factory. Nothing beautiful.
Then in the 1870s, he began pouring iron into molds shaped like skillets, and something happened that nobody expected. The pans were perfect, thinner than anything on the market, lighter, smoother. The iron had a finish like glass because Griswold used a finer sand casting method that nobody else could match. Other foundries literally used Griswold pans as templates for their own molds.
You can still find ghost marks on the backs of competing pans where the Griswold logo was barely sanded off. The competition did not try to beat them. They traced them. Then the fire came, 1885.
The factory burned to the ground, and Matthew Griswold looked at the ashes and started building again, bigger. He rebuilt the factory, reorganized the company, and then went to Congress twice, elected as a Republican in 1891. His son took over, then his other son, then his grandson, then his other grandson. Five Griswolds ran that factory over 81 years, five generations of one family pouring iron in the same building in the same city, and every single pan that came out had the same cross and the same two words on the bottom, ERIE PA.
As if the city itself was part of what made them. There was a woman in that factory named Edda Moses. She worked for Griswold for more than 50 years. Her job was to answer every letter from every housewife in America who had a question about cooking with cast iron.
In the 1920s, she started writing recipes under the name Aunt Ellen. She was not famous and she was not management. She was the woman who sat at a desk and wrote back to women she had never met, telling them how to season a skillet, how to make cornbread, and how to fix a pan that someone had ruined by washing it with soap. Then the family fell apart.
Roger Griswold died suddenly in 1944. His brother Eli took over and immediately started fighting with the rest of the family. Eli wanted to sell. The others did not.
Eli won. In 1946, he sold the company to investors from New York and walked away from 81 years of his family’s name on a building. The investors ran it into the ground. Aluminum pans from companies with bigger advertising budgets took over the shelves.
The magic that had made Griswold iron feel like glass was fading because the people making the decisions no longer cared about iron. They cared about margins. In December 1957, the factory at 12th and Raspberry Streets in Erie poured its last pan. Sixty workers were told to go home.
Men who had spent 20 years pouring iron, men whose fathers had poured iron in the same building, walked out into the December cold. Some of them looked back at the building. Some of them did not. They locked the doors, sold the equipment, and tore it down.
Ninety-two years of American manufacturing reduced to a vacant lot in a city that was already losing everything else. The name showed up on a few pans made in Ohio for another decade, but without ERIE PA on the bottom. Anyone who picked one up could feel the difference. The iron was thicker, rougher, heavier.
The surface that used to feel like glass now felt like sandpaper. Whatever those men in Erie had known, whatever secret lived in their hands and their sand and their molds, it did not make the trip to Ohio. By 1973, they stopped using the Griswold name altogether. One hundred eight years after Matthew Griswold walked away from a farm in Connecticut, his name disappeared from every pan in America.
You can feel the difference today if you hold a Griswold in one hand and a modern cast iron pan in the other. The new one is heavier, thicker. The cooking surface is rough and pebbly because nobody polishes them anymore. Polishing costs money, and the companies that make cast iron today are not making heirlooms.
They are making products. A Griswold from 1920 weighs a pound less than a Lodge from 2025, and it cooks better and feels better in your hand. Run your finger across the cooking surface and it is so smooth your fingernail cannot catch on anything. One hundred years old and it is still better than anything you can buy in a store today.
Nobody alive knows exactly how they got that surface so smooth. Some things, when they die, they take their secrets with them. But the pan did not disappear. The company died.
The factory is rubble. The family scattered. The workers went home. But the skillet your grandmother handed to your mother who handed it to you is still on your stove right now.
One hundred years old and it still makes cornbread the way it made cornbread in 1935. The eggs still sizzle the same way. The handle is still too hot to grab without a potholder. And the bottom still says ERIE PA in raised letters that your fingertip can trace in the dark.
Now people are paying what your father paid for a used car to own one. A Griswold with a spider logo from the 1880s sold for $10,000 at auction. A number 13 skillet went for $6,700. A toy-size number one that fits in the palm of your hand sold for $9,500.
People drive hundreds of miles to cast iron auctions in Indiana, sit in folding chairs, and bid on pans that someone’s grandmother fried chicken in. They take them home and they cook in them because a Griswold does not become an antique. It becomes a better pan. Every year of seasoning makes it smoother.
Every meal makes it darker. Every hand that grabs the handle wears the iron down a thousandth of an inch, and the pan just gets better. That is why people pay $9,000, not because it is rare, but because it is still the best pan they will ever own. A hundred years from now it will still be the best pan someone owns, and that person will flip it over and run their finger across the bottom and feel the letters ERIE PA and wonder who made this thing that nothing could destroy.
Some of you found yours at an estate sale. You were walking past folding tables of old dishes and ceramic figurines, somebody’s entire life spread out in a driveway, and there it was, black, heavy, priced at three or five dollars. You picked it up and you knew the second your hand closed around the handle. The balance, the weight, the way the iron felt warm even though it had been sitting in a cold garage all morning.
You turned it over. The cross. Griswold. ERIE PA.
You paid the five dollars, took it home, and cooked in it that night. The steak hit the screaming hot iron and the sound filled the whole house. Your wife came into the kitchen and asked what the pan was. You said, “It is a Griswold.
” She asked what a Griswold was, and you did not know how to explain it because the answer was too big. It is a pan that someone’s mother used to feed her family. It is a pan that a man in Erie, Pennsylvania poured from molten iron in 1920. It is a pan that survived two world wars and a depression and the death of everyone who ever cooked in it.
It is five dollars and it is perfect and it is yours now. Your grandmother did not know it was worth anything. She just knew it worked. Nothing stuck to it if you treated it right.
It heated evenly and held heat longer than anything else in her kitchen. She was too heavy for a woman with bad wrists, but she used it anyway because she was not going to let a skillet win. She called it my iron. Not my Griswold, not my skillet.
My iron, as if there was only one, and for her there was. The day she gave it to your mother was the day she gave her the kitchen. You have it now. Maybe it is on the stove.
Maybe it is in the cabinet. Maybe it is hanging on a hook next to the one your wife bought from Target that weighs twice as much and sticks no matter how much oil she uses. Take it down. Hold it.
Flip it over. There it is. Griswold, ERIE PA. A man made that iron in a factory he rebuilt from a fire in a city he walked to from a farm in 1865.
It passed through more hands than you will ever know and it landed in yours because someone along the way decided that this one goes to the next one. Every scratch is a meal somebody cooked. Every dark spot is a Sunday somebody spent in a kitchen you will never see. That skillet is the only thing in your house that your great-grandmother touched that you can still touch.
It works after everything. After the fire and the family and the factory and the hundred years of hands, it still works. The company died.
The skillet did not.
