All About Pocket Knives

At various times over my many years of looking at countless thousands of knives, I have picked up a knife with the CHALLENGE CUTLERY BRIDGEPORT CONN tang stamp and based on the appearance of the knife (pattern, blade grinds, pulls, etc) believed it to be a knife made by Utica. These would all be pre-WWII era knives of course.

I often wondered whether Challenge did indeed contract Utica to make some knives for them.

This may be proven, as I recently picked up a lot of Utica Cutlery paper items (came from a print shop in upstate NY).

Included was an uncut original "onion skin" sheet of knife wrappers. About half are Utica and half Challenge.

I'm guessing that Utica handled both the manufacture of the knives for Challenge and supplying the wrappers and wrapping the knives.

Very cool. Those remind me of the older Case wrappings. Interesting how, if you dig deep enough, you find that companies you thought were separate from one another actually combined resources at some point in the past.

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Mike

David Clark has the original Schatt & Morgan records that includes a book of the knives they made.In it were orders filled for themselves, hardware brands and other jobbers,and several different manufacturers.

That is a really cool find. Most people don’t know it but Napanoch had a paper manufacturing industry that made that type of paper. I would bet it was made there. I’ve fond some info recently that shows some knives were packaged in individual envelopes made out of similar type of paper. Here is a pick. I think it explains why I can not find packageing for the knives I collect. Mike, it’s interesting that you mention Case here. When Case Bro’s went out of business Challenge was one of the companies they owed money to. Kind of illustrates how all these manufactures were working together on some level.