The Little Red Riding Hood Cookie Jar: One Design Patent, Two Potteries, and a Fake Signed by a Third

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

Hull Pottery filed one design patent for the Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar in 1943, then shipped the unglazed jars to a decorating contractor in Illinois that, within a decade, was making the jars on its own. Decades later, a jar carrying the identical design turns up stamped "McCoy" on the bottom — a company that, by its own collectors' society's account, never touched this design at all.

The 1943 design patent, and the woman who filed it

Louise Elizabeth Bauer filed an application for "Design for a Cookie Jar" on April 12, 1943, from Zanesville, Ohio, nine miles from the Hull Pottery plant in Crooksville. The patent office granted it ten weeks later, on June 29, 1943, as U.S. Design Patent D135,889, assigned to the A.E. Hull Pottery Company. The patent itself is short, as design patents are: two line drawings, a front elevational view and a side elevational view, and a single claim — "the ornamental design for a cookie jar, as shown." There is no mechanism to describe and no function to claim, only the shape: a girl in a hooded cape carrying a basket, the basket itself forming the jar's lid.

A design patent like this one protects exactly one thing — the ornamental appearance shown in the drawing — and nothing about a company's right to the character's name, the story it comes from, or the word "Hull" itself. Those protections, when a company wants them, come from separate filings. Hull never made one for "Little Red Riding Hood." A federal trademark search for that exact phrase turns up seven registrations, every one of them modern: the earliest, filed in 1997, covers snow globes for an unrelated company, and none traces back to pottery, ceramics, or the 1940s at all. For four decades, the only thing stopping a competitor from copying Bauer's jar outright was the design patent's own term — and design patents from this period typically ran just a few years before lapsing into the public domain, which may be part of why copies of this exact silhouette turn up under other names, discussed below.

Why two different companies made the same jar

Hull Pottery had been in business since 1905, founded by Addis Emmet Hull in Crooksville, Ohio, making stoneware, semi-porcelain dinnerware, and tile. Little Red Riding Hood, introduced in 1943, became — in the company's own later account of its history — the most popular line the factory ever produced, eventually expanding from the cookie jar itself into teapots, canisters, a mustard jar, salt and pepper shakers, and a milk pitcher, all built around the same hooded-cape figure.

Hull did not do all of the work alone. The jars came out of Crooksville as plain bisque — fired but undecorated — and were shipped to Regal China Corporation in Antioch, Illinois, for painting, glazing, and the gold trim some pieces carry. Regal was itself a going concern by then: founded in Chicago in the late 1920s or 1930s by Herman Kravitz, it relocated to Antioch in 1940 and was purchased within the decade by the Royal China and Novelty Company, which kept Regal running as a contract decorator for other potteries' blanks — Hull's Little Red Riding Hood line among them.

That arrangement held through Hull's worst year. On June 19, 1950, a flood and the fire it triggered destroyed the Crooksville plant. Hull rebuilt and reopened on January 1, 1952, and continued the line through 1957, the year collector consensus marks as its end. What happened to the Hull–Regal arrangement during the two-year gap, and after, is the subject of real, unresolved disagreement among people who study this pottery closely — covered on its own below.

Looking for a Little Red Riding Hood piece, other Hull Pottery kitchenware, or anything from the same mid-century character cookie jar family for the shop or your own collection?

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How to tell a real one

Genuine jars carry an incised mark on the base reading "Hull Ware Little Red Riding Hood" — the Hull Pottery name paired with the line name, not a plain "Hull" alone and not "Regal China" alone, since Regal decorated under Hull's own mark rather than its own. A piece that left the factory truly unmarked also exists; Hull's kitchenware lines were inconsistently marked through the 1940s, so the absence of a mark is not on its own proof of anything, genuine or otherwise.

• Read the base mark first. "Hull Ware Little Red Riding Hood," incised into the clay before firing, is the standard genuine mark. A raised or applied mark, rather than incised, or a mark reading only a single word, is worth a second look.
• Check the basket shape. Most surviving jars have an open, two-sided basket — collectors describe it as taco-shaped — rather than a fully enclosed round one. A round basket is the less common of the two genuine variants — not a flaw, just the rarer of two real shapes, and a round-basket jar should not be assumed to be the standard one.
• Look for the apron. The great majority of jars show the figure wearing a small apron over the dress. Examples without one exist but are substantially less common — rare enough that their absence is itself a collecting point, not a manufacturing defect.
• Weigh the glaze, not just the shape. Hull and Regal used the same red as the dominant color on most examples, which is exactly what makes the two makers' output hard to tell apart by sight — color alone will not settle which company's hands actually finished a given jar.

The look-alikes

Two different problems share this jar's shadow, and only one of them involves an actual second pottery.

Napco, an importer working with Japanese manufacturers, sold its own Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar in 1957 — the same year Hull's line ended. It is a real, differently made piece from a real company, not a copy passed off as Hull's, and it is legitimately collectible in its own right. A buyer who wants specifically the Hull/Regal jar, rather than any Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar, needs to check the base mark against Napco's own marking rather than assume every jar in this silhouette came out of Ohio or Illinois.

The second problem is a forgery, not a rival manufacturer. The McCoy Pottery Collectors Society — the specialist body for authenticating McCoy's own output — states flatly that "McCoy did not make any Little Red Riding Hood items. The genuine LRRH was made by Hull Pottery," and warns that copies "were made marked McCoy" specifically to confuse buyers. A jar stamped "McCoy" on the bottom is not evidence of a third original manufacturer; by the account of the people with the most reason to claim McCoy pieces if they were actually McCoy's, it is evidence of a fake mark applied after the fact.

Where the records disagree

The clean version of this jar's story — Hull molded it, Regal only decorated it — is the version most retellings repeat. A more recent account, syndicated through Harry Rinker's "Treasures" collectibles column, complicates it: Rinker reports that collectors now suspect "most of the production was done by the Regal China Co. of Antioch, Ill.," rather than Regal serving only as a decorating contractor for jars Hull itself continued to mold throughout the line's full 1943–1957 run. Neither account cites a company record settling which company's kiln actually shaped a given jar in a given year, and this guide found none either. The honest position is that the Hull-molds/Regal-decorates split is well documented for at least part of the run, the claim that Regal took over outright at some point is a real, separately sourced theory and not a fringe one, and no source checked for this guide resolves which was true for jars made after Hull's 1950 plant fire specifically.

A smaller, stranger disagreement sits inside the patent record itself. Google's own digitized scan of D135,889 transcribes the assignee's name as "The A. E. Hall Pottery Company" — not Hull. Every other record checked for this guide, including Hull Pottery's own company history and its own documented trademark and mark usage, agrees the company was A.E. Hull Pottery, in Crooksville, Ohio, and that Louise Bauer's design became "Hull Ware Little Red Riding Hood" on the jars themselves. A single-letter OCR slip on a scanned 1943 document is a far more likely explanation than a second, identically timed Ohio pottery company — but it's a reminder that even a primary federal document, read through automated text extraction, can introduce an error a careless retelling might repeat as fact.

What one sells for now

No confirmed realized auction price for a specific Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar could be verified for this guide. The figures that do circulate split into two very different categories, and conflating them is the most common mistake in how this jar gets valued online.

The first category is a syndicated newspaper collectibles column's reported range: roughly $200 to $300 at retail for a jar in mint condition, with $100 to $150 described as a more realistic auction expectation. These are a columnist's stated estimates, not documented sales, and are given here at that weight only.

The second category is older and far larger — and, by the same column's own account, no longer current. During the line's peak collecting years, related pieces reportedly commanded dramatically higher prices: an advertising sign said to have sold for $15,000, a canister near $5,000, and individual cookie jars approaching $1,000. The column that reports these numbers also states plainly that "those days are now gone." Treat both sets of figures as reported rather than verified, and treat the gap between them as itself part of the jar's story — a line that was scarce and expensive to collect at one point, and is a comparatively affordable, common mid-century find today.

Hunting for Hull Pottery, Regal China, or other mid-century character cookie jars for the shop or your own collection?

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For another collecting guide built around a mark that turns out to be the wrong one, see the McCoy panther attribution guide. For another case where a company's own catalog, not an outside source, is the thin thread an attribution hangs on, see the Phil-Mar panther catalog guide. For another jar whose maker's trademark came along decades after the object itself did, see Masonite, named after its inventor, not a masonry trade. See more Field Guides