Will The Real J.C. Moore Please Stand Up?

A couple of years ago my husband and I acquired an unusual copper / sugar creamer set. They were large and had oversized wooden handles. They were marked "JC Moore 837" on the bottom. Here's what they look like:

When we researched them online, we kept seeing other people selling them for very high prices and saying they were related to Tiffany & Co. However, we could never find a source that substantiated that connection, just a lot of people making the claim. It's understandable how folks might draw such a conclusion, as there are two different men named John C. Moore who have worked at Tiffany.

In the mid to late 1800s, Tiffany commissioned work from a prominent NY silversmith, John C. Moore, and later acquired his operation. He went on to win numerous prestigious design awards for them. In 1907, his great grandson, also named John C. Moore, became the President of Tiffany.

We weren't too comfortable with the cloud of confusion around this, so my husband sent an email to a Tiffany expert. Her name is Wendy Yothers, and she had worked as a conservator for Tiffany. She was kind enough to reply, and here is what she had to say about the pictures we sent her:

The pieces you pictured are definitely not Tiffany, and were not made by either John C. Moore or his grandson. The craftsmanship is not of their calibre, and the style is inconsistent with either of their time frames.

That felt pretty conclusive to us, so we didn't use any information about Tiffany to sell them. We put them out at our local antique mall for a modest price, where they sold fairly quickly. Recently, I spotted another set at my local Goodwill and snapped them up. Now I was back to the missing history of these items and the need to figure out who made them.

Once again, the number of places that still attribute these to Tiffany is pretty overwhelming. The vast majority of the references either say nothing at all or they mention the Tiffany connection, which turns our mission into a "needle in a haystack" operation. Luckily I've picked up a few research tricks since I last had this item on my plate.

One of the best sources for concrete information about brands and companies is Google Books. You can plug names into a search of their archive and get results from old magazine ads, business directories, and more. I have used this many times to create a rough timeline for an old business. It's not perfect, but it can turn up information that's not floating around the normal collector's circles. It's also handy for brands that don't have a big enough following to generate a collecting site.

It took some tweaking of the search terms, but my husband finally got one hit with Google Books. It's just a snippet from an old Cattleman's catalog from 1953:

We felt strongly that this was referring to our sugar and creamer. They have carved wood handles with a flame-like shape. Unfortunately, Google won't let us read anything beyond the snippet view. My husband managed to abuse the snippet system to force more of the text out and finally pieced together the whole ad:

Magnificent coffee urn in heavy copper that holds two full gallons of coffee. Made by J. C. Moore, California coppersmith, it features his trademark in the hand-carved oak flame top and handle. It's mounted on legs of brass and chained to tilt for easy pouring. Lined in silver, it heats by Sterno. A truly handsome piece.

"The Cattleman" is still being published today, as it has been since 1916. My husband decided to contact the publication directly to see if we could get a copy of this elusive page from their archives. They were kind enough to send us a PDF of the page and didn't even charge us a fee for it (thank you!). Here is the actual ad:

You can see that the shape and the handles of this urn match our sugar/creamer set. I'm pretty confident that this photo proves that the "JC Moore 837 copper" wares are from California, not New York or Tiffany, and were made in the mid 20th century.

My husband and I are hoping that by sharing this information, we can dispel the misinformation out there about these items. Even if sellers continue to include the Tiffany reference, hopefully buyers who do their due diligence will be able to avoid making a costly mistake. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of folks out there who are paying premium prices for these pieces, believing they are made by an iconic Tiffany designer.