Jadeite Glass: McKee Made It First, and Fire-King Still Gets the Credit

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

McKee Glass sold the first opaque jade-green dish in 1930. Jeannette Glass followed two years later, out of a factory in a Pennsylvania town named for McKee's own wife. Anchor Hocking didn't reach the color until 1945 — fifteen years behind the company that invented it — and still ended up owning the name collectors use for the whole category today.

Who made jadeite first, and who didn't

McKee Glass Company put the first opaque jade-green glass kitchenware on the market in 1930, under the trade name "Skokie Green." The company renamed the color "Jade Green" in 1931 when it launched the line alongside its Laurel dinnerware pattern. McKee was, by the accounts used in this guide, the first American glassmaker to sell this specific look at commercial scale: a solid, milk-glass-opaque green meant to read as jade rather than as transparent depression glass.

Jeannette Glass Company entered the same market two years later, in 1932, with its own opaque green line marketed under the name "Jadite" — no hyphen, a different spelling from both McKee's "Jade Green" and the "Jade-ite" spelling Anchor Hocking would use more than a decade later. Three companies, three names, one color, and today collectors use all three spellings more or less interchangeably for glass none of the three original makers would have called by the others' name.

A rival's factory in a town named for McKee's wife

H. Sellers McKee co-founded the firm that became McKee Glass Company together with a partner, J.A. Chambers, trading in its early years as Chambers and McKee Glass Works. In 1888 the company relocated to a newly platted site in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania — a town McKee named Jeannette, after his wife, Jeannette E. Hartupee McKee. McKee Glass ran its main operation there for the rest of the company's independent existence.

Jeannette Glass Company, McKee's jadite-era rival, was not McKee's subsidiary and was not founded by the McKee family. It began as the Jeannette Bottle Works and was incorporated under its better-known name on June 14, 1898, building its own plant on Chambers Avenue — a street named, like the town itself, for one of the two men who had put McKee's own business on the map fifty years earlier. Jeannette Glass took its name from the town it sat in, the same way any company named for its home address would; the town, in turn, had been named for the wife of the man running its biggest rival glass works. By the time Jeannette introduced Jadite in 1932, two competing glassmakers were selling the same color of glass out of the same Pennsylvania town, one of them named, however indirectly, for the other company's founder's wife.

The two companies' histories tangled further decades later. McKee was sold in 1951 to Thatcher Glass Company, which in turn sold the former McKee operation to Jeannette Glass Corporation. Jeannette then moved its own manufacturing into the old McKee plant — meaning the rival that arrived second to the jadite color eventually ended up owning the factory of the rival that got there first. Operations at the site ceased entirely in 1983.

Fire-King arrives last, and keeps the name

Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation didn't exist yet when McKee and Jeannette were building their jadite lines. It formed on December 31, 1937, from the merger of the Hocking Glass Company — founded in Lancaster, Ohio in 1905 by Isaac J. Collins — and the Anchor Cap and Closure Corporation of Long Island City, New York. Fire-King itself launched in 1942 as "Fire-King Oven Glass," a direct response to wartime metal shortages: steel, aluminum and iron were reserved for military production, and a line of ovenproof glass bakeware filled the gap left by metal pans. The first Fire-King color, Sapphire Blue, appeared in a Good Housekeeping advertisement that October.

Fire-King's first jade-ite dinnerware pattern, called Alice, didn't arrive until 1945 — distributed, like a number of period premium china lines, inside oatmeal boxes rather than sold outright on store shelves. That makes Anchor Hocking the last of the three companies to reach the color: fifteen years behind McKee, thirteen behind Jeannette. It is also, by a wide margin, the name most current collectors reach for first. "Fire-King Jadeite" functions today as something close to a generic term for the whole category, McKee's and Jeannette's own earlier glass included — the reverse of the usual genericide story, where the pioneer's name becomes the generic one. Here the company that showed up last ended up owning the word.

Two federal trademarks, seven years apart

The FIRE-KING mark has two separate federal trademark registrations behind it, filed exactly seven years apart to the day. The first, Registration No. 388,452, was filed February 13, 1941 and registered June 24, 1941, covering "glass pie plates, custard cups, covered casseroles, meat loaf pans, utility pans, and other oven ware food preparing vessels" — oven glass specifically, sworn to a first-use-in-commerce date of January 30, 1941. That filing predates the jade-ite color by four years and predates Fire-King's own public launch by several months.

The second registration, No. 522,575, was filed February 13, 1948 — the same calendar date as the first filing, seven years on — and registered March 21, 1950, this time covering the dinnerware class: cups, saucers, fruit dishes, cereal bowls, pie or salad plates, soup plates and dinner plates, the goods that would actually carry the jade-ite color collectors prize. The oddity is in the sworn dates. The second filing claims the identical first-use date as the first: January 30, 1941. Taken at face value, that means Anchor Hocking's own federal paperwork dates its dinnerware trademark rights to four years before Jade-ite dinnerware existed as a product. It's common trademark practice to extend an established mark's priority date across a later-filed class covering the same underlying brand name — but it leaves a federal record in which the mark is, on paper, older than the dish it's now best known for.

The blacklight test rewards the wrong era

McKee's and Jeannette's pre-war opaque green glass contains uranium oxide, added to the batch to help produce the color, and genuinely radioactive at a level most sources describe as harmless in normal handling. Glass containing uranium fluoresces a visible green under ultraviolet light — the same reaction collectors use to identify Vaseline and other uranium glass, covered in this shop's own guide to that category. Hold a genuine pre-1942 McKee or Jeannette jadite piece under a blacklight and it glows.

Fire-King's Jade-ite does not glow at all, under a blacklight or anything else, in any era of its production. The United States restricted uranium for civilian use between 1942 and 1958, as the material moved into nuclear-weapons and reactor programs, and Anchor Hocking's color — mixed from recycled green glass cullet blended into a milk-glass base rather than from uranium oxide — was formulated without it from the start. The practical result runs backward from what most collectors expect walking in: a piece that glows under UV is proof it is NOT Fire-King. It's older glass, from one of Fire-King's two rivals, made before the wartime restriction took hold.

How to tell an original from a reissue

• A plain "Fire-King" script mark inside an oval, often with "Made in U.S.A." beneath it and no other text, is the standard vintage Anchor Hocking stamp used across the original 1945–1976 production run. It does not narrow production to a specific decade on its own.
• A piece stamped with the word "2000" alongside the Fire-King name is part of Anchor Hocking's own official relaunch that year, openly marketed as new production rather than passed off as vintage.
• Run a blacklight over the piece. If it glows green, it predates 1942 and is McKee's or Jeannette's glass, not Fire-King's, regardless of what the backstamp says. If it doesn't glow, the blacklight test alone can't separate a 1945 original from a 2000 reissue — check the stamp and the weight and finish instead.
• A maker's mark reading "Made in China" points to At Home International's modern jadeite-style line; "Made in France" points to Duralex. Neither is a McKee, Jeannette, or Anchor Hocking product, vintage or otherwise.
• An intact printed or gold-foil paper label on the glass, rather than a mark pressed or stamped into the glass itself, is generally a sign of genuine old stock that was never used — collectors tend to value these higher, not treat them with more suspicion.

The look-alikes: old rivals and new copies

The first layer of look-alikes is the three original makers themselves. McKee's Jade Green, Jeannette's Jadite, and Fire-King's Jade-ite are different formulations from different factories, made across different decades, and a piece from any one of the three can be mistaken for either of the others at a glance — the blacklight test above is the fastest way to at least rule Fire-King in or out.

The second layer is current manufacturing. Jadeite-style glass is back in active production from several makers who are not trying to pass their work off as vintage: Mosser Glass, Pioneer Woman, Martha Stewart, Gibson, Tablecraft, Westmoreland, Country Living and Farm-House Market all currently sell or have recently sold jade-green glass and ceramic tableware aimed explicitly at the same look. None of this is forged or fraudulent — it's openly marketed, clearly contemporary retail product — but a new piece resold years later without its original packaging can land on a secondary marketplace looking far older than it is. A Gibson reproduction piece and an authentic Fire-King Restaurant Ware piece in the same general shape can carry list prices an order of magnitude apart, which is exactly the gap that makes a buyer's five minutes with a blacklight and a close look at the backstamp worth the trouble.

What jadeite sells for

Only one figure found in this research is described by its source as an actual recent sale rather than an asking price: a four-piece nesting Fire-King mixing bowl set, reported sold on eBay for $100 in a syndicated newspaper appraisal column. The same column lists common D-handle Fire-King coffee mugs at roughly $15 to $40, mixing bowl sets generally at $100 to $300 depending on condition and pattern, and rarer forms — splash-proof batter bowls, swirl-pattern plates and accessories — starting around $300, though it does not state whether those broader ranges reflect sales or typical listing prices, so they're presented here as a reported range rather than confirmed sales.

Everything else below is an asking price, not a sale. A modern Gibson reproduction of a classic Fire-King mixing-bowl shape has been listed around $200, against a listed asking range of $400 to $1,000-plus for an authentic Fire-King Restaurant Ware pitcher in poor condition — the gap between a knowing new purchase and a damaged original piece of the real thing. Replacements, Ltd., the tableware-matching retailer, maintains a standing price list for individual period patterns, which is useful for sourcing a specific piece but is, again, a list of what sellers are asking rather than a record of what buyers have paid.

Where the records disagree

Sources disagree on McKee Glass Company's founding date and original name. Most accounts, including the company's standard histories, place the founding in 1853 in Pittsburgh as "McKee and Brothers Glass Works" or "McKee and Brother Glass Works." One secondary source instead gives 1834 and the name "S. McKee & Company." This guide does not pick a winner — the 1853 date has more independent corroboration among the sources checked, but neither claim is dismissed outright.

Jeannette Glass Company's own founding year is given as both 1887 and 1888 across sources checked for this guide, with the company itself most commonly cited as incorporating formally in 1898 regardless of which earlier date is used for the original Jeannette Bottle Works.

Finally, one source states that Jeannette's own Jadite kitchenware line ended sometime in the 1940s, without naming a year; no second source checked for this guide confirms or contradicts that specific claim, so it's presented here as a single, unverified account rather than an established fact.

This shop's guide to Vaseline glass covers the same uranium-fluorescence authentication test from the other direction — a trademark fight over a color name, rather than a three-way race to a shared one. The Heisey Glass guide and the Pyrex guide cover two more Depression-era glass names from this same drawer. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.