Overview
For over 200 years Pfaltzgraff has shaped American homes with beautifully crafted ceramics, symbolizing quality, design and innovation.
The company grew from a modest-size pottery shop that produced simple earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware crocks and even flower pots into one of the best known designers and marketers of dinnerware, drinkware, flatware and giftware. Several Pfaltzgraff patterns are among the best-loved dinnerware designs in America, including Winterberry, Villa della Luna, Yorktowne and Trellis.
Our History
The Pfaltzgraff family immigrated to the United States in the early 1800's and set up a small potter's wheel and kiln on their modest twenty-one acre homestead in York County, Pennsylvania. The earliest Pfaltzgraff market was defined to be "as far as you can get with a horse and a wagon and then get back home the same day."
As the Pfaltzgraff brothers expanded their potteries and business horizons, the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution was changing the United States from a farm-based society to an urban, manufacturing-driven economy. And so, in 1889 George and Henry Pfaltzgraff created a partnership that would grow into the Pfaltzgraff Company.
Our First Factory
In 1894 brothers Henry B. and George B. Pfaltzgraff joined forces to build a new, modern plant that would streamline production, and to locate that facility on a railway line to expedite shipments to customers in a wider geographic area. Up until that time a Pfaltzgraff potter's market had been defined as the distance a horse and wagon could travel and still return home within a day.
The photograph shows factory employees standing in front of and sitting upon a boxcar with the factory visible behind them. The gentleman standing in the boxcar door, on the right, is George W. Pfaltzgraff, son of George B. Pfaltzgraff. George W. would play a key role in the expansion of the company in the twentieth century.