Cookie Jars - Sweet and Popular Collectibles
American Pottery Cookie Jars by Abingdon, Shawnee, McCoy and More
Why Collectors Love Cookie Jars
If it’s true that our collections evoke nostalgia, or speak to our other or earlier selves, few other collectibles speak as strongly as the cookie jar. Most Americans of a certain age have a past that include a cookie jar (home of Mom or Grannie’s delicious home-baked treats), and most grown-up kids can demonstrate the perfected art of noiselessly lifting the ceramic lid from the pottery body for a sneak treat that would spoil your dinner.
Early Cookie Jars
The earliest cookie jars appeared on the scene in the 1930s, when pottery manufacturers noticed that more homemakers had begun baking homemade treats rather than purchasing them, and needed something to put them in. The earliest cookie jars were simple forms, possibly reworked from existing molds, such as balls, cylinders, or pitchers bean jars or crocks. Prices for early cookie jars in simple shapes remain as low as $20-$30.
Figural Cookie Jars
By the mid 1930s, cookie jars were clearly a commercial success, so potteries began manufacturing them in a series of forms and shapes. These are the figural cookie jars, and as a collecting segment, figurals of the 1930s and 1940s are probably the most eagerly sought and therefore the most valuable. Cookie jars appeared in a variety of clever and whimsical forms including people, animals, buildings, transportation, furniture, kitchen utensils, fruit & vegetables, food, musical instruments, globes, teapots, clocks, treasure chests, patriotic themes, trash cans, traffic lights and more.
In excellent condition, figural cookie jars of popular or crossover characters can cost into the thousands. Since the majority of cookie jar handlers were butterfingered and sneaky children, jars without chips on the lids or rims tend to be hard to find.
Licensed Figural Cookie Jars
Based on demand, huge quantities of cookie jars were made in the likenesses of movie, television and comic book and comic strip characters. These were licensed by the holder of the copyright to a variety of manufacturers, and included Superman, Muppets, Laurel & Hardy, Howdy Doody, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Yogi Bear, Star Wars, Wonder Woman, Woody Woodpecker, W.C. Fields, Davy Crockett, Peanuts characters, and of course, most major Walt Disney characters.
American Cookie Jar Manufacturers
From approximately the 1930s through the late 1970s, homemakers bought cookie jars in vast quantities from these American potteries:
- Abingdon
- American Bisque
- Brush
- California Originals
- Cardinal
- Doranne of California
- Gilner
- Gonder Art Pottery
- Hull
- McCoy
- Maddux of California
- Metlox
- Morton Pottery Co
- Pfaltzgraff
- Red Wing
- Regal China
- Robinson Ransbottom
- Shawnee
- Treasure Craft
- Twin Winton
- Walt Disney
Source:
- The Collector’s Encyclopedia of Cookie Jars by Fred Roerig & Joyce Herndon Roerig, 1991, Collector Books (Schroeder Publishing)
