American Gas Machine Co.: the company that built Sears' lanterns

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 1, 2026

Sears never built a gasoline lantern in its life. Every "J.C. Higgins" lantern pulled from a basement came from a small company in Albert Lea, Minnesota, that was already thirty years old and had patented its own flame before Sears ever put one in a catalog.

The company behind the Sears badge

A gasoline lantern stamped "710-74010" or "710-7401" on the fount looks, to most people who find one, like a Sears product. It is a Sears model number, printed in a Sears catalog, sold under Sears' own J.C. Higgins house brand. Sears never built it. Sears never built any lantern it sold. The company that actually made it, decade after decade, was American Gas Machine Co., a manufacturer in Albert Lea, Minnesota, that most of its own customers never heard of.

This is not a hidden conspiracy; it was ordinary mid-century retail practice. Sears, Montgomery Ward, and regional chains like Gamble-Skogmo routinely put their own house-brand names on goods built by independent manufacturers, and the manufacturer's own name rarely appeared anywhere a shopper would see it. What makes AGM worth a dedicated look is how long it did this, how many names its lanterns wore, and how completely the company itself has been forgotten next to the brand everyone assumes made this category: Coleman, the subject of Owl and Twig's own guide to Coleman's patent history. AGM was Coleman's real, if quieter, Midwestern rival for most of the twentieth century, and it is the company standing behind a large share of the "mystery brand" lanterns that turn up at Michigan estate sales with no obvious maker's name on the fount at all.

A company older than its own patent

According to a 2002 local-history piece in the Albert Lea Tribune, American Gas Machine Co. was established in 1894 by H.C. "Gas" Hansen, to manufacture "stoves, heaters, lights and lanterns operated by gas" for rural households that had no electric service. The company ran two plants in Albert Lea, one on East Clark Street and a second on West Front Street near the rail line, and by the newspaper's account eventually sold products in the United States and more than sixty other countries. The same article credits the company with building "the first American gasoline camp stove" in 1911.

What AGM did not have, in 1894 or for the next eighteen years, was a patent on its own core lighting mechanism. That did not arrive until 1912. A company can sell gas lamps and lanterns for nearly two decades on established, unpatented lighting technology and only later patent a specific improvement, and that is apparently what happened here: AGM's founding predates its own foundational patent by eighteen years, the reverse of the usual collector's-guide shape, where a patent explains how a company got started.

The two patents behind the flame

AGM's lighting patent is US1,040,388, "Vaporizing and Superheating Incandescent Lamp," filed May 1, 1912, and granted October 8, 1912, in the name of inventor Hans Z. Nelson, assigned to American Gas Machine Company. The mechanism vaporizes gasoline, routes the vapor through a removable heating pipe, mixes it with air in an expanding chamber, and burns the mixture inside an inverted mantle, the same basic "hollow wire" gasoline-lighting family Coleman's own founding patent belongs to, patented a dozen years after Coleman's 1900 mechanism patent and independently of it.

A second AGM patent, US1,387,152, "Folding Camp-Stove," was filed July 21, 1917, and granted August 9, 1921, in the name of inventor Hans C. Hanson, also assigned to American Gas Machine Company. It describes a portable stove that collapses flat for carrying and unfolds into a rectangular casing with hydrocarbon burners, its removable lid doubling as a support tray in use. The two inventors' names, Nelson and Hanson, are easy to mix up on a quick read and are not the same person; the company's lighting work and its stove work carry two different inventors' names five years apart.

AGM's first lantern model, numbered 333 and dated by collector researcher Terry Marsh to around 1913, would have competed directly against Coleman's own No. 316 arc lantern of the same period. From its first lantern onward, AGM was built to go head to head with Coleman, not to avoid it.

Where the records disagree

The company's own founding date is not settled. The Albert Lea Tribune's 2002 local-history article states 1894 and names H.C. "Gas" Hansen as founder. A long-running collectors' forum thread on classiccampstoves.com, discussing the related Albert Lea Foundry Co., states instead that "AGM was formed in approximately 1903." The two sources are nine years apart and neither cites a primary incorporation record this guide could independently verify; both are given here rather than resolved in either direction.

The post-World War II ownership chain is consistent in outline but not identical in every detail across sources. The Albert Lea Tribune states plainly that "after World War II, American Gas Machine Co. was acquired by Queen Stove Works, also of Albert Lea." A specialist lantern-collector site, terry-marsh.com, instead describes the successor as "the Queen Products Division of the King Seeley Corporation," and a period AGM-lineage camp stove is captioned on the same site as made by "Thermos, the successor company to American Gas Machine," in 1961. Read together, the likeliest sequence is Queen Stove Works first, absorbed into King-Seeley's Queen Products Division, with Thermos named as the line's successor by 1961 — but no single source states that full chain in one place, and this guide is assembling it from three partial accounts rather than quoting one authority.

One lantern, sold under three names

AGM's Model 3016, an instant-lighting single-mantle lantern, is the clearest documented case of the same physical object wearing different retail names. Collector reference materials record AGM selling it under its own catalog name, Sears selling the identical lantern as Model 710-7401 (appearing in the 1942 Spring-Summer Sears catalog at $5.79), and Gamble-Skogmo, a Minneapolis-based retail chain, selling it again as its own Model 3006. None of the three retailers built the lantern; AGM built all of them, in Albert Lea, and stamped a different model number on the fount depending on which store's order it was filling.

The pattern is not limited to one model or one decade. AGM's Model 3026 was sold by Sears as Model 710-7402. Its Model 3006 went to Gamble-Skogmo. A separate, later generation of J.C. Higgins lanterns, including Model 710-74010 and 710-74030, carries AGM's own internal model codes on collector reference lists (LCS and LRL series) well into the 1950s and 1960s, long after the Model 3016-era badge engineering began. A buyer holding a "Sears lantern" and a buyer holding a "Gamble-Skogmo lantern" from the same years may well be holding the same manufacturer's work under two different names, and neither store's name belongs on the credit line.

How to tell a real one

• Check the base rest for a small hexagonal identification tag; several documented AGM lantern models carry one, separate from any retailer's own stamped model number on the fount.
• Look for "AGM" cast or stamped directly into the fount or burner frame, and for an "Albert Lea, Minn." stamp, both independent of whatever store-brand name and model number also appear.
• A lantern with red-painted "U.S.F.S." lettering was property-marked by the U.S. Forest Service; a lantern with a plain "U.S." stamp on the fount bottom was approved for, and very likely issued to, the World War II military. Neither mark is decorative.
• Check how the globe attaches. Collector references for this era note two distinct methods on genuine AGM models: a top nut, and three retaining tabs positioned just above the ventilator brim. A badge or model number is easy to fake with a reproduction decal; a period-correct retention method on an intact, unaltered lantern is harder to fake convincingly.
• Globes themselves are frequently marked MacBeth Thermo or McKee Glasbake, two glassmakers that recur across multiple AGM lantern generations; a globe from either maker is consistent with, though not proof of, an AGM-built lantern.

The look-alikes

Coleman is the look-alike that matters most, since it is the name most buyers reach for first on any unfamiliar gasoline lantern; Owl and Twig's Coleman guide covers its own mechanism, dating codes, and maker's marks in full, and a lantern that is not stamped Coleman anywhere, including under the globe, is the first sign it may be an AGM product or an AGM-built house brand instead. The badge-engineering problem documented above cuts the other way too: a lantern stamped "J.C. Higgins" or carrying a Gamble-Skogmo model number is not evidence of a different manufacturer at all, just a different point of sale for the same AGM-built object. And the "Sunflame" name trap described above applies here as a look-alike risk specifically: a federal trademark search on that word alone will return a 1989 mantle-maker's registration with no connection to AGM's own 1940s lantern line of the same name.

What they sell for

No confirmed auction-house realized price could be found for an AGM or J.C. Higgins lantern. A U.S. Forest Service-marked AGM lantern does appear in LiveAuctioneers' own price-result archive as a completed sale, but the actual hammer price sits behind that platform's paywall and could not be verified here; it is noted only to say a completed sale exists, not what it brought. Every other figure below is an asking price from the active resale market, or a historical retail price, and is labeled as such.

A working 1960s single-mantle J.C. Higgins lantern, Model 710-74010, asked $33.00 on eBay in used, functional condition. AGM's own-branded Model 3016 lanterns ask in a band from roughly $69.95 to $84.99 on the current resale market, depending on condition and completeness. For historical contrast rather than a value comparison, the same Model 3016 design sold new, as Sears' Model 710-7401, for $5.79 in the 1942 Spring-Summer Sears catalog; that figure describes what the lantern cost brand new eighty-odd years ago, not what an old one is worth today, and the two numbers should not be read as a single trend line.

Hunting an AGM lantern, a J.C. Higgins piece with a mystery model number, or anything else from the gasoline-lighting shelf to check against this guide?

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The end of the name

During World War II, AGM turned its gas-appliance line toward the war effort; the Albert Lea Tribune credits the company with building "thousands of the gas-fired portable stoves" issued to the armed forces, and surviving lanterns stamped plainly "U.S." on the fount bottom date from this period. After the war, per the Tribune, Queen Stove Works, also based in Albert Lea, acquired American Gas Machine Co. outright. Collector sources place the business afterward inside King-Seeley Corporation's Queen Products Division, still in Albert Lea, and credit Thermos, by 1961, as the line's named successor company, based in Macomb, Illinois.

The Tribune's account of what happened next is blunt: AGM's own stove and lantern products "were phased out by the late 1950s or early '60s" as the Albert Lea operation shifted toward the Scotsman brand of ice cube makers, the product line that eventually came to define what was left of the plant. A company that had patented a flame in 1912 and quietly built a large share of the gasoline lanterns sold in the American Midwest for the next half-century ended up making ice machines under someone else's brand name, in the same city where H.C. "Gas" Hansen had started it, by most accounts, in 1894.

For more on AGM's bigger, better-remembered rival, see Owl and Twig's guide to Coleman's own patent history. For the Sears side of the badge-engineering story, see the guide to the Sears Wish Book catalog. See more Field Guides