A Catalog Reference · the premium parent — the bridge, and Queen's mirror

Schatt & Morgan

Gowanda, N.Y. → Titusville, Pa. · the quality-first cutler its own foremen broke from and then bought — the firm whose catalogs are Queen's pre-war paper

✓ Primary — read directly / record checked ~ Corroborated — reliable secondary ⚑ Archival — identified, off-line

The premium parent, the bridge, and Queen's mirror

The Queen page is the story of a firm with almost no pre-war paper of its own. This is the firm whose paper it used. Schatt & Morgan is Queen's parent — the quality-first cutler that five fired foremen broke from and then bought at a 1933 sheriff's sale — and it is Queen's mirror: two priced catalogs, a fully coded numbering system, even a patent, where Queen has none. It is also the guide's one bridge: the Gowanda plant S&M bought in 1897 was the C. Platts & Sons works, tying it — by shared building, not bloodline — to the Case / Cattaraugus / Platts family on one side, while its bankruptcy hands it to Queen on the other. ~ S4

This entry follows the pre-war Schatt & Morgan: the New York Cutlery Company that bought the Platts plant and turned itself into a maker, the S✕M mark that dates it, the handle-coded numbering, the founder's one patent, the private-label knives it ghost-made for Sears and W. Stokes Kirk, and its WWI navy work. Keep it clear of the 1991-and-later Queen “Schatt & Morgan” revival — same front stamp, but a year on the back tang.

Page 21 of Schatt & Morgan's Catalog No. 2 (c.1908): four ascending genuine-stag folding hunters (Nos. 4147, 2199, 1149, 3309) with S✕M Titusville tang stamps, over a Per Doz. price table. — **The premium maker, priced.** Catalog No. 2 (c.1908), p. 21: four ascending **genuine-stag folding hunters** — Nos. 4147, 2199, 1149, up to the big **No. 3309 at $12.00/doz** (the priciest knife in the verified catalog), tang-stamped **“S✕M TITUSVILLE.”** The caption: “ALL OF THE ABOVE STAG HANDLES · Equipped with our **Patent Piercing Tool**” — the very patent shown below. ✓ image-verified · S2

Corporate genealogy — New York Cutlery Co. → the Platts plant → Titusville → Queen

~1890–95New York Cutlery Company — an NYC importer/jobber run by John W. Schatt (from the J.R. Torrey razor works) and Charles B. Morgan (a knife salesman). ~ S8
1897Buys the vacated C. Platts & Sons cutlery plant at Gowanda, N.Y.; becomes a MAKER; adopts the “Schatt & Morgan” name and the S✕M device. ~ S4
1899Trade press names “J. W. Schatt, of the New York Cutlery Co., Gowanda” — the anchor that the founder is John W. Schatt. ✓ S5
1902Lured to Titusville, Pa. by the Board of Trade (cheap oil-region natural gas); production Jan. 1903. ~ S5
1908John W. Schatt patents the “Piercing Tool” (US 890,457, granted June 9) — the firm's one patent. ✓ S3
1911Morgan buys out Schatt and becomes president; later twice Titusville mayor (Schatt's fate after this is unknown). ~ S8
1915–18WWI navy contracts — ~30,000 clasp knives for the U.S. Navy, plus a Canadian Navy lot. ~ S9
~1928Manufacturing practically ceases (Depression + Morgan's turn to politics). ~ S8
1933Sheriff's sale → Queen City Cutlery — S&M's own fired foremen. Morgan later returns to Queen as a salesman. ~ S8
1991 → 2019Queen revives the “Schatt & Morgan” name (Keystone Series); after Queen closes (2018) the marks pass to Cooper Cutlery (2019 auction). ✓ S6

The bridge node — one Gowanda plant, two dynasties. The cutlery works S&M bought at Gowanda in 1897 was the one C. Platts & Sons had just vacated. Charles Platts was the Sheffield master cutler who ran the Cattaraugus factory (~1891); his firm moved on to Eldred, Pa. and into W.R. Case & Sons (1905), and his son Harlow (who married Debbie Case in 1892) founded Western States Cutlery. So one building launched both the Platts→Case→Western dynasty and Schatt & Morgan→Queen. The tie is shared real estate, not bloodline — Platts took its people and tooling to Eldred; S&M bought the plant — but it makes S&M the one node that bridges the guide's two great family clusters. ~ S4

The one patent — the founder's piercing tool

Correcting the record: the Queen page's flat “no Schatt & Morgan patent” is slightly too broad. S&M held exactly one — and it is the founder's, and it is the accessory the hero plate advertises.

US Patent 890,457, Piercing-Tool, J. W. Schatt, patented June 9 1908: Fig. 1 shows an awl blade seated in a jigged-handle pocket knife. — **US 890,457 — “Piercing-Tool,” John W. Schatt, granted June 9, 1908**, assigned to Schatt & Morgan. Fig. 1 shows the awl seated in a jigged-handle S&M knife — the “Patent Piercing Tool” the c.1908 catalog page above advertises. A Google Patents assignee search returns **exactly one** patent for “Schatt & Morgan”: this. ✓ image-verified · S3

It is an accessory (a folding punch/awl), not a knife mechanism — so the guide's knife-patent point survives in refined form: no folding-knife/frame/mechanism patent was ever assigned to S&M (or to Queen City); the only mechanism patents in the whole Gowanda→Queen line are Queen's post-war Erickson patents. But S&M is not patent-less — and the one it has is a rare catalog-to-patent match. ✓ S3

The number — handle = the LAST digit (Remington, mirror-swapped)

S&M's number is a bare figure whose last digit encodes the handle material, the leading digits a pattern/frame ID — the same idea as Remington, but mirror-swapped, and catalog-only (the tang never carried it).

3092 3096 3098

frame 309 = the Cattle Knife · last digit = handle: 0 cocobolo · 2 ebony · 6 bone(“stag”) · 8 pearl (premium line adds 3 genuine stag, 1 fancy pearl)

The worked example — and the earliest paper. Catalog No. 1 (1903), p. 34: the boxed S✕M device over the Cattle Knife (3092/3096/3098), Premium Stock (3302/3306/3308), and Woodman's Knife, tang-stamped “S✕M GOWANDA. N.Y.,” with the oil-town boast, “ALL OUR BLADES FORGED AND TEMPERED BY NATURAL GAS.” ✓ image-verified · S1

Coded and consistent at its core (even digits 0/2/6/8), fuzzier at the odd “variant” slots (3/5/7/9); in the premium pen/whittler line the leading digit tracks blade count (2513/3513/4513). Suffixes tag features, not handle: EO = Easy Open, ¼ = size/clip, B/W = Black/White celluloid. vs Remington: same “handle = last digit” idea, but S&M has no type-prefix, uses overlapping variable-width frames, is mirror-swapped (S&M 6 = bone / 3 = genuine stag; Remington the reverse), and — unlike Remington — never stamped the number on the tang. ✓ S1 ~ S11

Revival trap — the number inverts. The 1991-and-later Queen “Schatt & Morgan” revival flips the scheme to handle-FIRST (first two digits = handle: 03 stag, 04 bone, 06 Winterbottom), e.g. 032125 — the opposite of the pre-war last-digit code, and out of scope. ~ S7

The makers — a premium house that also ghost-made for others

S&M sold proudly under its own S✕M mark and ghost-made private-label knives for others — the same “the name on the blade is the client, not the maker” theme that runs through Camillus and Walden. The proof is a drawer of old dies found in the Titusville factory:

Blade mark	Made for	Era	Note
CHRIS WOLF	Sears, Roebuck	~1905–16	a Sears house line — named for an S&M foreman.
JESS CROUCH	W. Stokes Kirk (Phila.)	1919–20	a 4¼″ pocket-hunter — named for J.V. Crouch, S&M's secretary-treasurer; “rarest of the rare.”
ESEMCO	S&M's own budget line	pre-war	phonetic spelling of “S.M.Co.”
Curtin & Clark	a contract customer	pre-war	die found in the same factory drawer.

Its own men on other people's knives. The wrinkle unique to S&M: the private-label names were its own foremen and officers (Chris Wolf → Sears; J.V. Crouch → W. Stokes Kirk). And it closes a loop — when Queen absorbed S&M in 1933, those dies passed into the Queen factory. ~ S7

What a knife cost — the richest priced brand in the guide

S&M is one of the guide's best-priced makers — two catalogs, image-verified. Catalog No. 2 (c.1908) runs a full line: the chained fob No. 1185 CH at $3.00/doz, the imitation-stag jacks (2167/1126/1106) at $6.00/doz, ebony/rosewood premium jacks at $7.25–9.00/doz, and the genuine-stag folding hunters up to No. 3309 at $12.00/doz (~$1.00 each). Catalog No. 1 (1903) is the unpriced Gowanda pattern book. ✓ S2

Patterns & handles — a grade, not a single model

Pattern	What it is	Note
No. 3309	large genuine-stag folding hunter	the hero plate; the priciest verified S&M ($12/doz).
Cattle Knife (309)	2-blade serpentine stock knife	the numbering hero — 3090/3092/3096/3098.
Whittler / Congress	3-blade split-back whittlers; 4–6-blade congresses	the premium showcase in pearl / genuine stag — the grail grade.
Sleeveboard / lobster pens	dressy gentleman's multi-blade pens	the fancy pearl line (terminal-1; leading digit = blade count).
Premium Stock · Woodman's · Pruner · Doctor's	working & specialty patterns	the stout everyday spine of the line.
Jess Crouch	single-blade contract pocket-hunter	the rarest single named S&M (W. Stokes Kirk, 1919–20).

Handles: S&M's calling card is the top grade — genuine stag and mother-of-pearl (+ black pearl / abalone), nickel-silver-lined and etched — over ebony, cocobolo, rosewood, bone, horn, ivory, with German-silver (nickel-silver) bolsters. Celluloid was used but un-branded (no “Pyremite”/“Fiberloid”/“Pyralin”) — S&M even codes it as a letter suffix (B/W), like Robeson, NY Knife Co., and Queen. The grail is a grade — a pearl or genuine-stag exhibition whittler/congress — not one iconic model. ~ S1/S7

The navy work — a pure cutler's war, two contracts

Where Remington and Winchester were gun-makers who did war work, S&M is a pure cutler that filled navy contracts: ~30,000 clasp knives for the U.S. Navy, and a smaller lot (~1915) of large marlin-spike clasp knives for the Canadian Navy — the surviving Canadian examples carrying the “broad-arrow-inside-C” arsenal acceptance mark, and reckoned better than the early British counterparts. ~ S9

Dropped as unverified: the seed's “officers' knives,” and a “MADE IN U.S.A.” circle tang stamp (Goins ties that mark to Camillus/Ulster/Schrade Sears work, not S&M).

Dating a knife by the stamp — the place line, and the revival trap

There's no number on the tang, so the S✕M device is the constant and the place line is the dating spine:

The stamp reads…	Date	The tell
S✕M / NEW YORK	~1897–1900	the formative Gowanda mark (“New York” = the state); the rarest.
SCHATT & MORGAN / GOWANDA, N.Y. (full name)	~1897–1902	the scarce full-name early mark.
S✕M / GOWANDA. N.Y.	~1897–1903	the workhorse early mark — on the 1903 catalog (the die lagged the 1902 move).
S✕M / TITUSVILLE (+ full name)	~1903–1931	the main Titusville-era mark — on the c.1908 catalog.

Genuine vs the 1991+ revival — the decisive tell. Queen revived S&M in 1991 using replica old dies, so the front “Gowanda/Titusville” stamp on a modern knife is practically identical to a genuine one — you can't authenticate on it. Check the back of the master-blade tang: a modern knife carries a 4-digit production year (1991–2017) + a Queen mark + often a “1 of N” etch and a serial. A genuine pre-1931 S&M has none of that — no year, no serial — and is plain carbon steel (any stainless, D2, or ATS-34 = modern). ~ S7

The trademark dates the revival, not the maker. There is no pre-1931 federal registration of “Schatt & Morgan” — the pre-war S✕M marks were common-law. The name is registered only because Queen revived it (Reg. 1,735,605, 1991 — honestly first-use June 1991) and the 2013 refiling then reached its claim back to 1897 to grab the heritage; the live mark is the Coopers'. Like New York Knife Co., Cattaraugus, Schrade, and Robeson, the surviving registered mark dates a modern revival, not the maker. ✓ S6

Sources

Primary sources are documents read directly; secondary are reliable leads. Full metadata (identifiers, URLs, quotes) lives in data/schattmorgan.json.

Schatt & Morgan catalogs — Catalog No. 1 (1903) p. 34 (the Gowanda line-art / the numbering) & Catalog No. 2 (c.1908) p. 21 (the priced stag folding hunters, to $12/doz) + pp. 22/58/74/81/85. PD house catalogs · image-verified (collector-hosted scans; watermark cropped, cite to the catalog). ✓ S1/S2
US Patent 890,457, “Piercing-Tool” — John W. Schatt, assigned to Schatt & Morgan, granted June 9 1908; the firm's only patent, and the “Patent Piercing Tool” of the catalog. Google Patents · PD · drawing image-verified. ✓ S3
The Platts / Gowanda bridge — Historic Path of Cattaraugus County, AllAboutPocketKnives, Knife Talk: the 1897 purchase of the C. Platts & Sons plant; the Platts→Case→Western line. ~ S4
Period trade press — Hardware Vol. 20 (1899, “J. W. Schatt…Gowanda”) & Vol. 35 (1907); Hardware World Vol. 15/16 (1920/21). archive.org · PD. ✓ S5
David Clark, “The Jess Crouch Knife” (the factory die-drawer: S&M / Queen City / Curtin & Clark / ESEMCO / Jess Crouch; Chris Wolf → Sears) + the V9 tang-stamp guide; USPTO revival marks (Reg. 1,735,605 / 4,487,860); founder & WWI leads (NWPA Stories, Argo Coins, Ron Flook); and David Krauss's history. ~ S6–S11