Pickard China

Pickard China is a family firm, now in its fourth generation, that makes fine china in Antioch, Illinois. Wilder Pickard founded it in Chicago in 1893 as a studio that hand-painted blanks imported from Europe and Japan. His son Austin moved it to Antioch and in 1937 introduced the company’s own china body, a warm white ware with the lion mark. The firm has made its china in Antioch ever since. Its own history says the war years were what finished the change: imported blanks stopped arriving, and a Navy contract for gravy boats kept the kilns fired.

The company says it is now the only maker of fine china in the United States. Each piece goes through at least 21 stages in the Antioch plant. A 2015 newspaper report put the factory at 50 employees and followed a finisher at work on the Obama state china. Pickard has also made china for the State Department’s embassies, Air Force One and Camp David.

Everything in its online shop is its own china: dinner plates, teacups, mugs, serving pieces and place settings, most banded in gold or platinum. Every order is made to order and takes four to eight weeks, longer for monograms and custom work. The product pages do not carry an origin line of their own. The claim of American manufacture comes from the company’s FAQ and history pages, backed by outside reporting on the factory.