Anchor Hocking's Depression Glass: Patent and Trademark Guide

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 20, 2026

A frosted pink cake plate in Hocking Glass Company's Mayfair pattern sold on eBay this month for eight dollars. Turn it over and there is no maker's name, no logo, nothing stamped into the glass at all.

That absence is not wear or an off-run piece. Mayfair ran from 1931 to 1937, and Hocking Glass Company did not have a registered maker's mark of any kind until a year after Mayfair was already off the line. The company's own name took a quarter century longer than that to become a federally registered trademark for the glassware it actually made.

A cake plate with no maker anywhere on it

Isaac J. Collins founded Hocking Glass Company in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1905, naming it for the river running through town. Collins had come to Lancaster as a young man to work as a decorator at a pressed-glass plant; he stayed to run one of his own for the next four decades, serving as Hocking's president and later, in 1944, as chairman of its board. He lived to 100, dying in October 1975 at his home in Lancaster, five days short of his birthday.

By 1930 Hocking was machine-pressing tableware in the floral, ribbed, and geometric patterns now sold as Depression glass: Cameo that year, Princess and Mayfair the next. None of the three carried any maker's mark, because Hocking had not yet registered one. That did not stop collectors a century later from going looking for one anyway — and finding, correctly, that there isn't one to find.

What Anchor Hocking actually registered, and when

Hocking Glass Company merged with the Anchor Cap and Closure Corporation in 1937, becoming Anchor Hocking. The combined company moved fast on a mark for the new name's symbol: an anchor laid over the letter H, first used in commerce (per the federal filing) on June 11, 1938, filed for registration that November, and registered April 9, 1940 as No. 376,781, covering glass bottles, tumblers, tableware, and related items. It stayed on the books, with two renewals, until it was cancelled under Section 8 in 2001 — by which point later versions of the anchor mark had long since taken over.

The company's own name moved much slower. ANCHOR HOCKING as a plain word mark for glassware wasn't filed until November 7, 1962, almost a quarter century after the 1937 merger that created it. The sworn first-use date on that filing is November 1, 1961 — meaning the company that had been selling glass under the name Anchor Hocking since 1937 didn't claim to be using it as a trademark, in the legal sense, until 24 years later. Registered September 3, 1963 as No. 756,056, it is still active today, renewed as recently as 2013.

Set against the patterns, the gap is almost exact. Cameo and Princess both finished their runs in 1934, four years before the anchor-and-H mark existed at all. Mayfair ran one year past that into 1937, the same year as the merger, and was gone from the catalog before the mark's first recorded use the following June. A genuine piece of any of the three left the factory before Hocking had a registered mark to put on it.

Three patterns no one patented

None of the three patterns Hocking is best remembered for today was protected by a design patent. A search of the federal patent record for Hocking Glass Company as assignee turns up no design patent for Cameo, Princess, or Mayfair's pattern — only later design patents, decades on, for unrelated tumbler and bowl shapes made by what had by then become Anchor Hocking Corporation.

Cameo's own origin shows why that gap mattered less than it might have. In the late 1920s Hocking acquired the Monongah Glass Company of Fairmont, West Virginia, and sent most of its molds to the Lancaster plant. Monongah had been hand-finishing a pattern called Springtime; Hocking copied it closely, cut new molds so it could run on a pressing machine instead, and released the result in 1930 as Cameo, also marketed as Ballerina. Nothing stopped the borrowing from running the other direction, either: Owens-Illinois later used Hocking's own Cameo decanter mold to produce dark green vinegar bottles, with no lawsuit recorded on either side.

Princess followed in 1931, one of Hocking's first mold-etched lines, made in pink, green, and a topaz that ranges toward amber on some pieces collectors call apricot. Mayfair came out the same year under the catalog name Line 2000; collectors nicknamed it Open Rose for its pattern, and it is the only one of the three that ran long enough, into 1937, to very nearly overlap the company's first trademark.

How to tell a real one

For a genuine 1930s piece, start from the absence: no anchor-and-H mark, no ANCHOR HOCKING name, nothing at all on the base beyond the mold seams and, on some pieces, a faint ring where the mold's plunger met the glass. A period Cameo, Princess, or Mayfair piece carrying any Anchor Hocking mark is a contradiction — the mark postdates the pattern.

Later Anchor Hocking glass does carry the mark, and it's worth seeing what that actually looks like against a piece that shouldn't have one. This Fire-King mug, currently in the shop, is a postwar Anchor Hocking line made well after the anchor-and-H mark existed:

Mayfair carries the sharpest fakes of the three. Reproduction cookie jars have circulated for years in colors Hocking never made in the pattern at all:

Color is the fastest single check on any piece, not just the cookie jar. Authentic Mayfair green runs a soft yellow-green; a bright, saturated emerald green on a piece sold as Mayfair is reason enough to look harder at everything else about it.

The look-alikes

Mayfair's floral, ribbed pattern sits in a crowded field of pink Depression-era glass from Hocking's own competitors, and the resemblance at a glance is real even though the companies and patterns are entirely separate. Jeannette Glass Company's Cherry Blossom, made from about 1930 into the mid-1930s, is the most heavily reproduced Depression pattern of any maker — enough that collector guides treat telling a real Cherry Blossom piece from a modern remake as its own specialized skill, distinct from anything to do with Hocking. Federal Glass Company's pattern now generally called Sharon, nicknamed Cabbage Rose for its large blossom motif, is the other major pink floral line from the same years.

None of these patterns were the subject of a legal dispute between the companies that made them, so far as this guide's research found. They are separate designs from separate factories, sold into the same market at the same low prices, distinguishable mainly by their motifs: roses for Mayfair, cherry blossoms for Jeannette's pattern, a large cabbage-like rose for Federal's. A collector sorting a mixed box of pink glass is working out which factory made a piece, not untangling a trademark fight that never happened.

What they sell for

Mayfair pricing runs from pocket change to hard to find in any quantity, with color doing most of the work. Pink is by far the most common color and the easiest to find; blue, which Hocking made in most forms but in far smaller quantity, is harder to find and more sought after; green exists mainly in a handful of large serving pieces; yellow is the rarest of the five colors Hocking made, described by longtime dealers as something they have never personally seen in hand.

Two real transactions anchor the low end. A frosted pink Mayfair cake plate sold on eBay for $8.00 on October 9, 2026 — a closed sale, not an asking price. Replacements, Ltd., the discontinued-pattern replacement service, currently lists a pink Mayfair serving plate with center handle at $59.99, a dealer's asking price for a piece in excellent condition rather than a record of what one has actually sold for. No confirmed realized price for a rare color — a yellow piece, or one of the scarce green large-format pieces — turned up in researching this guide; take any number attached to those as an estimate until a documented sale says otherwise.

Pam Meyer, chair of the National Depression Glass Association's annual convention, put the appeal of buying into this market in plain terms in a 2017 Antique Trader interview: "The first thing I recommend to people starting out is to learn as much as possible about Depression glass. Knowledge just makes the whole experience more fun." For a pattern whose own maker never put its name on the glass, that advice carries more weight than usual.

Where the records disagree

Two points in this research did not resolve cleanly.

First, the exact first-use date on Anchor Hocking's original anchor-and-H mark. The underlying federal trademark record states June 11, 1938. A detailed maker's-mark reference compiled from the same registration gives June 1, 1938. Both agree on the month and year; the day is off by ten, and this guide could not determine which is a transcription of the other.

Second, who founded the company. Wikipedia's own infobox for Anchor Hocking credits two founders, Isaac J. Collins and a second figure named E. B. Good. Wikipedia's separate biographical article on Collins describes him founding the company alone, with no mention of a co-founder at all. One encyclopedia, two of its own articles, two different answers to a one-word question.

For more on companies whose own trademark record trails their products by years or decades, see the guides to Howell Co. chrome furniture and Naugahyde. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.