Queen Cutlery Company’s “sandblasted” Blade Markings David A Clark

January 2015

The end of World War Two marked a new start for Queen City Cutlery. During the war years and following their incorporation in 1922 the company was known as the Queen City Cutlery Company. It seems that the Owners of the Company wanted a fresh start following the war and initiated several changes starting with a change to the company name. Queen City was incorporated in 1922 as a Delaware corporation. In January 1946 Queen City Company was dissolved and the cutlery was re-incorporated as Queen Cutlery Company, a Pennsylvania corporation.

The next few years saw other changes like a move to stainless as the standard blade steel, the publishing of annual catalogs, a change from Rogers bone and the early Winterbottom bone handles to a new Winterbottom bone, the introduction of new patterns, and obtaining patents on several of the new patterns. Probably the most recognizable change was the change that came by dropping the Queen City stampings and obtaining the new trademark, the “Crown over Q”. This mark evolved in several forms from tang stampings to blade etches. The various tang stamps have been documented and published in the last few years so we will not address those in the article but will focus on one particular type of blade “etchings” – sandblasting.

The time period that these blade marks were used has not been specifically determined. Documentation was probably destroyed or thrown away in the past or has just not surfaced yet. These marking are rare but can still be found on auction sites and at knife shows. As Queen Cutlery was changing from carbon steel to stainless steel as their primary blade steel they may also have been simultaneously looking a several different ways to identify their cutlery. A few years ago, a senior cutler at Queen told me that these sandblasting marks were made by placing a stencil over the blade then blasting with fine sand, some using the “Crown over Q” in the marking and others just the word “QUEEN.”

Using the word “QUEEN” got them into some legal trouble since that word was a Trade-Mark used by Henry Sears & Company. David Krauss in his book, “American Pocket Knives A History of Schatt & Morgan, and Queen Cutlery” addresses this issue in Chapter 18 in some detail. The short story is that the Henry Sears Company did have a Trade-Mark for the use of the word “QUEEN”, registered August 20, 1907; No. 64701. Henry Sears & Company went out of

business in the 1950s so the legal issue no longer existed. Queen Cutlery did obtain the “QUEEN” Trade-Mark on February 16, 1988. Queen was granted the Trade-Mark again and was registered on February 22, 1994; No. 1,822,386 and it is in use today.

All of these knives that used the sandblasted marks had these common characteristics: all were carbon steel, all had Rogers bone handles, and none had tang stamps and were marked with the blade marking only.

Queen Trade-Mark No. 424,480 October 8, 1946

Queen Knife Patterns (top to bottom) 85, 11,9, 10,a nd 3.

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