The hen got the franchise. The owl got the leftovers, a handful of molds, and a new owner every time a factory closed — which is exactly why it is the more interesting thing to collect.
Glass owl covered dishes come out of the American animal-dish tradition that Westmoreland built around the hen on nest starting in 1889. Owls were made in far smaller numbers by Westmoreland, Imperial, Degenhart, Boyd, Summit and L.G. Wright, often from molds that changed hands between them. The mark on the base is worth more than the shape, because the shape got reused for decades. Boyd's mark dates a piece to a five-year window. The National Milk Glass Collectors Society stamps its owls with a year and a city, which is the closest thing to a birth certificate this category offers.
Walk any estate sale in the Midwest and you will eventually meet a glass hen sitting on a woven nest, lid and base, usually milk white, usually five inches, usually four dollars. There are a great many of them because Westmoreland made its first around 1889 and kept making them for the better part of a century, and because roughly everyone else made them too.
The owl is the same idea executed maybe one time in fifty. Same two-piece construction — figural lid, nest base — same pressed-glass technology, same use as a candy dish that nobody ever put candy in. But where the hen was a staple, the owl was a novelty, and novelties get made in short runs, discontinued, and then revived years later by whoever bought the mold at auction. That history is the whole story of collecting them.
What these things actually are
The category term is the animal covered dish, and it predates all the companies discussed here — European makers were pressing them by the mid-nineteenth century. What Westmoreland did was industrialize the form for the American market and, per collectors of the pattern, coin the phrase “hen on a nest” in the 1930s.
The construction is simple and it matters for buying. A lid and a base, pressed separately, sold together. Two pieces that spent seventy years in different cupboards, different moves, different estate sales. A great many of the ones you will encounter are not the pair they left the factory as.
Drag to rotate. The parting line sits in the groove where the body meets the nest — the seam every one of these dishes has, and the first place to check that two halves belong together.
A lid from one maker on a base from another is called a married set, and it is common enough that you should assume it until proven otherwise. Check three things: that the glass color matches under the same light, that the mold crispness is comparable, and that both halves carry the same mark or are both unmarked. A married dish is worth substantially less than a matched one, and plenty of sellers describing them are not being dishonest — they simply never checked.
The four names to know
Westmoreland Glass Company (Grapeville, Pennsylvania, 1889–1984) is the origin point. Beyond the hen, Westmoreland made an owl figurine perched on two books, introduced around 1919, which becomes important in a moment. Later Westmoreland pieces carry a superimposed W and G on the base.
Imperial Glass (Bellaire, Ohio) produced the owl covered jar most people picture — a tall two-piece owl of roughly six and a half inches, catalogued as #3900, best known in caramel slag but also made in purple. Imperial closed in 1984, the same year as Westmoreland, and its molds scattered.
Degenhart — properly the Crystal Art Glass Company (Cambridge, Ohio, founded 1947 by John and Elizabeth Degenhart) — is where owls get complicated. Degenhart made owls in an enormous range of colors, and collectors who specialize in them trace the Degenhart owl directly back to Westmoreland's owl-on-books as a reproduction of that earlier design.
Boyd's Crystal Art Glass bought Degenhart in 1978, acquiring roughly fifty molds, and later added molds from Imperial and elsewhere until it held over two hundred. Boyd ran until Bernard F. Boyd retired in 2014.
Reading the base
Because the molds outlived the companies, shape tells you very little and the mark tells you nearly everything. A handful of marks cover most of what you will find.
| Mark | Maker | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| W over G, superimposed | Westmoreland | Later production; earlier Westmoreland is often unmarked |
| D inside a circle | Degenhart | Roughly 1967–1972 |
| D inside a heart | Degenhart | The heart mark dates to the mid-1960s, but before 1972 it appeared essentially only on owls. From 1972 to 1978 it was used across the line |
| B inside a diamond | Boyd | 1978 onward, and datable to a five-year window — see below |
| A crouching rabbit on a block reading NMGCS, with a year and a city | National Milk Glass Collectors Society | Stamped inside the base rather than underneath it. Dates the piece exactly. Owls were issued in 2002, 2017 and 2025 |
| No mark at all | Anyone | Early Degenhart, early Westmoreland, L.G. Wright, or a post-1999 wholesale reissue. Not evidence of age by itself |
Every five years, Boyd altered its B-in-diamond mark by adding a line or a letter. That means a Boyd piece can be dated to a five-year window from the base alone, which is a precision almost nothing else in American pressed glass offers. If a piece resembles a Boyd shape and carries no diamond B, treat that as a question rather than an answer — Boyd sold molds, and other hands ran them.
Two details worth carrying in your head. Degenhart marks were hand-stamped into the hot glass with a rod while the piece sat inverted in the mold, so they are frequently soft, shallow, or slightly malformed. That is normal and is not a sign of a fake. And when Boyd acquired the Degenhart molds, the Degenhart mark was removed and replaced — so a D in a heart means Degenhart made it, full stop, regardless of what the shape suggests.
L.G. Wright never made a single piece of glass
The name turns up constantly on owl listings, and it means something other than what most sellers think it means. Lawrence “Si” Wright founded his company in New Martinsville, West Virginia, in 1937, and for a while his business card read simply “Antiques.” He built the business on reproducing popular old patterns, and he owned molds rather than furnaces. The pressing itself was farmed out — to Fenton, Mosser, Westmoreland, Gibson, Summit and Viking, among others.
A Wright owl belongs to Wright the way a novel belongs to its publisher. Somebody else did the work at the bench. The owls turn up in cobalt, amber, and blue and purple slag, and as a rule they carry no mark whatsoever. Some Wright glass does wear an underlined W inside a circle, and pieces struck from old Northwood molds carry what collectors call the wobbly W — a Northwood N with an extra stroke added to pass for a W. Neither shows up reliably on the animal dishes. Shirley Smith, who spent years cataloging covered animal dishes for the collectors' society, put Wright plainly on her list of companies that never bothered to mark them.
Then, on May 27, 1999, the company held a going-out-of-business auction and roughly seven hundred molds went under the hammer. The owl did not survive the day intact. The National Milk Glass Collectors Society, bidding on behalf of its members, took the five-inch owl cover, one of eleven molds it carried home. A joint bid from Castle Reproductions and AA Imports, two reproduction wholesalers, took 147 molds — among them a five-inch owl base.
The society marks every piece it presses. The wholesalers, as the trade watchdog Real Or Repro noted at the time, sell their glass unmarked. Since 1999 the top of the owl has been willing to say where it came from and the bottom has not, which makes this the one animal dish where a married set can be half documented and half anonymous. Buy the pair, not the lid.
The club owls are the easy ones
Since its first convention in 1988, the National Milk Glass Collectors Society has commissioned one animal dish a year. They were never sold in stores — members only, in small numbers, one color per year. Three of them are owls: white in 2002, purple in 2017, dandelion yellow in 2025.
Every one is stamped, and stamped in an unusual place. Look inside the base rather than underneath it and you will find a crouching rabbit seated on a block reading NMGCS, along with the year and the city that hosted that year's convention. A 2002 owl reads NMGCS TX, 2002. The plungers that press those marks were cut by the Island Mould and Machine Company of Wheeling, West Virginia.
There is a second family trait worth knowing. With one exception, the 1998 rabbit, every commemorative the society has issued sits on a split rib base — the deep vertical ribbing chosen as a nod to McKee Bros. of Pittsburgh. Ribbing on its own proves nothing, since a ribbed bowl is a common enough shape. The stamp inside does.
One well-circulated sold listing is headed “NMGCS 2001 Commemorative Owl Head Covered Dish.” The society's own records give 2001 as the yellow cat and 2002 as the owl. It is an honest slip by a seller working from memory, and it is the reason to buy from a photograph of the interior rather than from the headline. Sellers also split about evenly between “owl head on nest” and “owl head on basket” for the same object, and a good number file it under nothing more specific than “owl candy dish.” Run all three searches.
Where Mosser fits, and where it does not
Mosser Glass, of Cambridge, Ohio, gets credited with owls it never made. The company bought heavily at the 1999 auction — 124 molds in all, including a nine-inch turkey jar that went for ten thousand dollars. It did not buy an owl. There is no owl on a nest in its catalog today either. The Mosser owls circulating online are solid figurines, not covered dishes.
Mosser still belongs in this story twice over. It was one of the factories Wright hired to press glass before 1999, which means a share of the owls sold as Wright are physically Mosser's work. And the society's recent commemoratives are almost certainly Mosser's as well. Neither organization says so on the record, but the colors give it away: Jadeite, Marble, Georgia Blue, Eggplant, Dandelion. Those are not descriptions. They are Mosser's own catalog colors, and they match the commemoratives of 2018, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 exactly.
Color, and the one test worth doing
Slag glass — the marbled, streaky effect on the caramel and purple owls — is not a coating or a finish. It is two or more colors of molten glass incompletely mixed, so the pattern runs through the body of the piece rather than sitting on it. Hold a slag owl to a window: the swirl should be visible in the thickness of the wall, not just on the surface.
The other test costs about ten dollars. Some of these were made in uranium glass, which fluoresces a hard green under a 365nm blacklight and is unmistakable once you have seen it. It does not make a piece more valuable on its own, but it does narrow the field considerably, and it is the closest thing to a free answer this hobby offers.
Buying one
- Turn it over first. Before the color, before the shape, before the price. The base carries the only information that is difficult to fake.
- Then look inside the base. This is the step almost everyone skips. The collectors' society stamps its mark on the interior floor, not the underside, and it is the one mark in this category that carries both a year and a place. A blank interior does not tell you much on its own. A rabbit and a year settles the question in a second.
- Check the lid and base against each other. Same color, same mold quality, same mark or same absence of one. Set the lid on the base and rotate it — a matched pair seats evenly.
- Run a fingernail around every edge. Rim chips on the lid and flakes on the nest base are the standard damage, and they hide well in a textured surface.
- Take a blacklight. Small, cheap, and it answers the uranium question in a second across a whole table.
- Buy unmarked pieces on the glass, not the story. An unmarked owl might be early Westmoreland, it might be L.G. Wright, or it might be a wholesale reissue pressed after 1999. If the seller is certain and cannot say why, price it as the reissue.
Why the owl stayed scarce
The hen on a nest sold because it read as a kitchen object. It sat on a counter, it looked like breakfast, and a manufacturer could move it in milk glass by the thousand. The owl never had that. It reads as a parlor object — slightly severe, slightly ornamental, closer to the ceramic panthers and the smoked-glass ashtrays than to anything a person would put on a breakfast table.
Which is precisely why it has aged better. The hen is a nostalgia object and priced accordingly. The owl, in caramel slag, on a walnut shelf, still looks like a decision somebody made on purpose.
LG Wright Blue Slag Glass OWL on Nest baby blue
NMGCS NATIONAL MILK GLASS COLLECTORS SOCIETY Purple
Westmoreland yellow custard owl on nest
We built a free sourcing dashboard that searches seventeen vintage marketplaces at once — useful for exactly this kind of hunt.
Open Prowl- Glass Bottle Marks, on the Boyd's Crystal Art Glass B-in-diamond trademark and its five-year variations
- WorthPoint Dictionary entries for Boyd Crystal Art Glass and the Crystal Art Glass Company (Degenhart)
- Glass Kitties, on locating and distinguishing Boyd and Degenhart marks
- Degenhart Owl Depot, on owl-specific mark chronology and the Westmoreland owl-on-books lineage
- Glass Encyclopedia, on the Boyd acquisition of the Degenhart molds
- Kovels and WorthPoint listings for Westmoreland animal covered dishes, and Kovels on L.G. Wright company dates and the circled W and wobbly W marks
- David Doty's Field Guide to Carnival Glass, on Imperial and Summit owl covered jars
- Real Or Repro, “Molds of L.G. Wright: the complete auction buyer's list,” for the May 27, 1999 buyer list and the record that Wright never pressed its own glass
- National Milk Glass Collectors Society, on the annual commemoratives, the split rib base, and the logo, year and location stamped on every piece
- Dee Sacherich, writing for the society, on the 1999 auction and the eleven molds it bought — including the five-inch owl cover
- Shirley Smith, “Hen on a Nest: Studying a Glass Collection,” NMGCS convention presentation, 2004, on which companies marked their animal dishes
- Mosser Glass, current catalog, for production and company color names
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