Queen
Queen City Cutlery, Titusville, Pa. · founded by men fired from Schatt & Morgan — who then bought the bankrupt parent, and whose earliest paper is the catalog of the firm they absorbed
The child that ate its parent — and the thinnest pre-war paper trail here
Every other maker here leaves its own pre-war record — a patent, a catalog, a registered mark, a numbering scheme. Queen leaves almost none. Around 1918 five foremen at the Schatt & Morgan Cutlery Co. of Titusville began making handle-less “skeleton” knives on the side; fired for it, they set up as Queen City Cutlery (a garage, 1919; incorporated 1922). When Schatt & Morgan went bankrupt in the Depression, Queen bought it outright at a 1933 sheriff's sale — factory, machinery, tooling, patterns, trademarks — and ran on it. So Queen has no pre-war patent, no pre-war catalog, no pre-war federal trademark, and no model-numbering system at all; it is dated by tang stamp alone, and its earliest evidence plate is the catalog of the parent it consumed. ~ corroborated · S7 ✓ trademark record · S3
This entry follows the pre-war Queen City: the Schatt & Morgan parent and the 1933 absorption, why Queen is the guide's most document-starved maker, the tang stamps that are its only dating spine, and — post-war — the reissue-house years that made Queen a major factory behind modern Winchester, Robeson, and Ka-Bar reproductions (though not, it turns out, the only maker of the Ka-Bar dog's-head). Keep it clear of the post-war crown, “Queen Steel,” and the numbered grails (the #99, the #45, the #25 Jet) — all of which come after the war.
Corporate genealogy — Schatt & Morgan, the breakaway, and the absorption
- 1895Schatt & Morgan founded by John W. Schatt & Charles B. Morgan as the “New York Cutlery Company” (a name-collision with — but unrelated to — the guide's New York Knife Co.). ~ S7
- 1897→ Gowanda, N.Y. (the old Platts plant). Trade press names “J. W. Schatt, of the New York Cutlery Co., Gowanda” by 1899. ✓ S5
- 1902→ Titusville, Pa., recruited by the Board of Trade with oil capital behind it (E.O. Emerson, John Fertig on the board); production Jan. 1903. ~ S7
- 1911Morgan buys out Schatt; later twice mayor of Titusville. ~ S7
- ~1918Five S&M foremen make handle-less “skeleton” knives on the side and wholesale them. ~ S7
- 1919Fired, they start Queen City Cutlery in a Titusville garage (“Queen City” = the town's oil-region nickname). ~ S7
- 1922Queen City Cutlery incorporated. ~ S7
- 1926Listed as a maker of “High Grade Stainless Steel Cutlery” — a genuinely early American stainless adopter. ⚑ S8
- 1933Buys the bankrupt Schatt & Morgan at a sheriff's sale (Aug. 21–22) — real estate, machinery, tooling, patterns, marks — and moves into its Chestnut St. factory. ~ S7
- 1945The crowned-Q “QUEEN” mark — USPTO first-use March 1, 1945: the crown that divides pre-war from post-war. ✓ S3
- 1946Name shortened Queen City Cutlery → Queen Cutlery Company. ~ S7
- 1969–2018Servotronics (1969) → Daniels Family Cutlery (2012) → closed Jan. 10, 2018. The reissue-house years (see below). ~ S7
The document-starved maker — why the plate is the parent's
The thing that sets Queen apart from the other eleven is an absence. Run the checklist that dates every other brand and pre-war Queen comes up empty on all four:
| The usual anchor | Pre-war Queen |
|---|---|
| A dated knife patent | None. The only firm-tied patents are post-war — US 2,530,236 (1950) & US 2,728,139 (1955), both Erickson. ✓ S4 |
| A company catalog | None before ~1946. The first Queen catalog is No. 82 (1947). ~ S7 |
| A maker's trademark | Common-law only. The earliest maker first-use of record is March 1, 1945 (the crown). ✓ S3 |
| A model number | None at all — the only maker in the guide that stamped no pattern number pre-war. Dated by tang stamp alone. ~ S6 |
So the honest evidence for pre-war Queen runs through two doors: its tang stamps (below), and the paper of the firm it absorbed. That is why both plates on this page are Schatt & Morgan catalog pages — not a sleight of hand, but the literal truth of Queen's pre-war record: the child's oldest catalog is the parent's, because Queen owned S&M's plates and pressed knives on its dies.
The reissue-house hub — a major factory behind three other pages' warnings
Queen's most consequential “maker” story is what it made for other brands. Under Servotronics (1969–2012), Titusville became the physical source of the modern reproductions this guide flags elsewhere — so a post-1970 knife wearing an old name may literally be a Queen:
| Reissued brand | Era | The tell |
|---|---|---|
| Schatt & Morgan (its own parent) | 1991+ | revived as Queen's premium line, on the inherited name and dies. |
| Ka-Bar (dog's-head — club knives) | 1977–~1990s | the Ka-Bar Collectors-Club dog's-head knives, serial/date-stamped — the “11/77” tell. Not the only maker: the 2010s dog's-head folder revival was Canal Street Cutlery (below), and the 1976 Bicentennial is Olean-stamped, forge uncertain. |
| Winchester (“Black Box”) | 1987–1992 | Blue Grass Cutlery's Olin license, releases 1–47, under Bill Howard — a black box with a red flocked insert = Queen-made. |
| Robeson (ShurEdge / PocketEze) | 1993–2017 | Queen returned the brand to production — PocketEze 1999–2001. |
What a knife cost — priced, through the parent
Queen published no priced pre-war paper of its own, so its price — like its plate — comes from the firm it absorbed. Schatt & Morgan's 1907 catalog (above) lists the imitation-stag jack No. 2167 at $6.00/doz — about fifty cents a knife, wholesale — and No. 1176 at $7.25/doz. Honest limit: this is the parent's price, not a Queen-branded one; no Queen City price grid from the 1920s–30s is digitized (Queen's own catalogs begin in 1947). ✓ S2 ⚑ Queen-branded grid
The number — there isn't one
Where Case is coded handle-first and even New York Knife Co. runs a plain sequence, pre-war Queen City has no model number at all — the only maker in the guide with none. It put no pattern number on the tang and printed no catalog to carry one; a pre-war Queen is identified and dated by its stamp.
The stamp is the identifier — no number to decode. (Post-war, and out of scope: a plain 1–66 = folders / 71–99 = fixed sequence, never positionally coded; handle codes like QN26WB are a 1990s revival.)
Closest to New York Knife Co. (plain sequential) and Camillus (not coded) — but a step beyond both: pre-war Queen has nothing to decode. Queen's famous tang-dot dating is a 1970s+ Servotronics system, post-war. ~ S6
Patterns & handles — the pre-war line, minus the famous grails
| Pattern | What it is | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Serpentine stockman | 3-blade, the bread-and-butter | the archetypal pre-war Queen City survivor (later numbered #26/#49). |
| Big Congress | 4–6 blade sway-back | a connoisseur's pre-war target. |
| Split-spring whittler | true 3-blade whittler | the build is pre-war; the numbered whittler line is post-war (1953+). |
| Gunstock & jumbo jacks | angular / large-frame jacks | characterful, desirable pre-war shapes. |
| #99 · #45 · #25 Jet | the famous named grails | ALL POST-WAR (the Jet's patent is 1950) — listed so they aren't misread as old. |
Handles: the pre-war primary bone is Rogers jigged bone; Winterbottom bone — the deep, wavy jigging cut by Samuel Winterbottom of Egg Harbor, N.J. — enters in 1930 but only becomes the Queen signature after the war (near-exclusive c.1950–59). Also pearl, stag, ebony, and celluloids (candy-stripe, imitation onyx) — un-branded, like Robeson and NY Knife Co. (no “Pyremite,” “Fiberloid,” or “Pyralin”). Steel is carbon pre-war; the branded “Queen Steel” stainless is a 1950s program (the rare early-1920s “STAINLESS” experiments aside). ⚑ S8
Dating a knife by the stamp — the whole spine, and the crown is the divider
| The stamp reads… | Date | The tell |
|---|---|---|
| S✕M · GOWANDA / TITUSVILLE | 1897–1931 | Schatt & Morgan — the parent Queen absorbed (revived 1991–2017; check the pile side). |
| QueenCity / Titusville, Pa. (serif) | ~1922–1933 | the earliest Queen City mark; Rogers bone, carbon steel — affirmatively pre-war. |
| QUEEN / CITY (block, 2 lines) | ~1922–1942 | the workhorse pre-war stamp — the classic pre-war Queen. |
| QCCC (cartouche) | ~1930–1932 | distinctive. (On a modern knife's shield → 2012–17 revival, not a tang stamp.) |
| Queen City (script) | ~1937–1945 | the latest pre-war mark, running to the 1946 name change. |
| crowned QUEEN / “Big Q” | 1945+ | the crown = March 1945 or later (Reg. 424480). Post-war. |
| Queen Steel / Q Steel | 1950s+ | branded stainless — rules out pre-war. |
Best tell: “QUEEN CITY” (no crown) on a carbon-steel knife = 1922–1945. Any crown, the word “Queen” alone, or “Queen Steel”/“Q Steel” = March 1945 or later. There is no number to help — the stamp is the whole story. ✓ crown anchor · S3 ~ chronology · S6
In period print
Queen City Cutlery, founded in Titusville in 1919, left no advertising of its own in the digitized press — it was a young breakaway firm. But the iron it ran on had a long paper trail: Schatt & Morgan, the older Titusville house Queen’s founders left, and later bought outright. The trade journals are public-domain scans; the newspaper was read on the original page.
“J. W. Schatt … New York Cutlery Co., Gowanda.”
The firm’s trade-press debut under its first name — John W. Schatt’s New York Cutlery Co. of Gowanda, N.Y., before the move to Titusville.
Hardware, Vol. 20 · 1899. Internet Archive →
“the highest grade knives made … guaranteed to cut a nail without the edge breaking.”
A South Carolina store’s standing ad for “the famous Schatt & Morgan pocket knives, razors and scissors.”
The Bamberg Herald, S.C. · Nov. 30, 1905. Library of Congress →
“Makers of S&M Brand Pocket Knives.”
The Titusville firm at its height in the trade weekly — one year before its own ex-workmen incorporated Queen City Cutlery down the road.
Hardware World, Vol. 16 · 1921. Internet Archive →
Sources
Primary sources are documents read directly; secondary are reliable leads. Full metadata (identifiers, URLs, quotes) lives in data/queen.json.
- Schatt & Morgan catalogs — Catalog No. 1 (1903) p. 34 (the line-art plate: Cattle / Premium Stock / Woodman's knives, “S✕M Gowanda”) & Catalog No. 2 (c.1908) p. 22 (the priced plate: No. 2167 $6.00/doz, No. 1176 $7.25/doz, Titusville). PD 1900s house catalogs · image-verified (collector-hosted scans; watermark cropped, cite to the catalog). ✓ S1/S2
- USPTO TSDR — the crown-Q “QUEEN” (Reg. 424480, first-use March 1 1945); the 1907 “QUEEN” trap (Reg. 64701, orig. Farwell, Ozmun, Kirk & Co.); the revival-held “QUEEN CITY” / “SCHATT & MORGAN” marks. Public-domain government records, read directly. ✓ S3
- USPTO patents — US 2,530,236 (Erickson, “assignor to Queen Cutlery Company,” 1950) & US 2,728,139 (Erickson, no assignee, 1955) — the only firm-tied knife patents, both post-war (they establish the “no pre-war patent” finding). ✓ S4
- Period trade press — Hardware Vol. 20 (1899, “J. W. Schatt…New York Cutlery Co., Gowanda”) & Vol. 35 (1907, the Titusville expansion); Hardware World Vol. 15 (1920) & Vol. 16 (1921, “Makers of S&M Brand Pocket Knives”). archive.org · PD. ✓ S5
- Secondary / leads: the Queen Cutlery Identification Guide (Tang Stamp & Blade Etch Dating, V9, 2023) for the stamp chronology; AllAboutPocketKnives / NWPA Stories / SMKW / Frank's for the genealogy, the 1933 sale, and the reissues; David Clark for Samuel Winterbottom & the 1930 first order; Goins' & Sargent's for marks/patterns. ~ S6–S9