The Trips He Did Not Count

Six boxes that all say America, one Tennessee town of 3,106 people, and a single line of enameled pots that the company's own website says comes from China or Vietnam.

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이 글의 한국어판 → 예외의 이름은 홈페이지에 적혀 있다

The shelf’s six questions, asked of Lodge. Every answer lands in one Tennessee town — and the company prints its own exception on the page where you choose a pan.

The miles he counted

On the last day of February in 1867, a young man walking out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, opened a notebook and wrote down the weather. "Start this morning in a light rain with mud half up to my knees. Travel about 18 miles and then rain compels me to stop for my feet have been wet all day as I was compelled to wade the Coons river which was over my boot tops with ice water mostly." A month later, in Missouri, he recorded a meal in nine words: "I have the first cornbread here I ever ate." That July, in Dyersburg, Tennessee: "Morning clear and beautiful. Take a walk before breakfast on a hill above town."

Joseph Lodge had left home in Pennsylvania at fifteen and spent his formative years on the road, working in machine shops. The diary survives because the company he founded still publishes it. On the evening of June 23, in Jackson, Tennessee, he stopped and did his arithmetic. "In the evening calculate how many miles I have traveled on foot. Find it over 1200 miles besides little short trips I have not counted."

Borrow that last clause and hold onto it. Besides little short trips I have not counted. Twelve hundred is the number that gets reported. The other quantity has no size at all: it is not disputed, it is not concealed, it is simply outside the arithmetic. A century and a half later his company would describe itself in exactly that shape, on its own website, in a sentence most of its customers will never scroll far enough to reach.

He kept moving. In October 1867 he took a ship to Cuba and stayed two years, then built and ran railroads in Peru, working in Spanish and signing his letters Jose Lodge. In 1876, at twenty-eight, he came back to look for industrial work, walked west out of Chattanooga, and stopped about twenty-five miles later at a small manufacturing town on the Tennessee River. He built a house there in 1877. A member of the Lodge family lives in it today. In 1896 he opened a foundry a few blocks away and named it for his friend the Reverend Joseph Blacklock. In May 1910 the foundry burned to the ground. Three months later it reopened down the road under the name it still carries.

Six questions

This magazine asks six questions of everything on an American shelf. Where was it born. Where is it incorporated. Where is the head office. Who owns the shares. Where is it made. Who signs the paycheck. When the six answers cluster, there is nothing to write. When they scatter, the gap is the article.

Lodge does not scatter, which by the rule above means there should be no article here.

Born: South Pittsburg, Tennessee, 1896. Incorporated: Lodge Manufacturing Company, 1910, private ever since, with no filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission because there is nothing to file. Head office: South Pittsburg — the history page says the company has "operated continuously in the same location ever since" the rebuild. Shareholders: about seventy people, all of them family, six generations down from the man with the notebook. Factories: two foundries in town, an enamel plant opened there in 2023, and a distribution center in New Hope a few miles off. Paycheck: roughly 570 people, the largest employer in the county, in a town that counted 3,106 residents at the 2020 census.

Six for six. That is where most writing about this company stops, and it is where the interesting part starts, because the exception is published. Lodge put it on a product page, under a question customers actually click.

"Imported from either China or Vietnam"

The page is called the Cast Iron Product Guide, and one of the questions on it asks which pans are made in America. The answer, as it read on August 27, 2026:

"We're proud to manufacture all of our seasoned cast iron and seasoned carbon steel in the USA—in our South Pittsburg, TN foundries, to be exact. As of 2023, we also manufacture one of our two collections of enameled cast iron here in our hometown: USA Enamel… Essential Enamel, another much-loved line of enameled cast iron, is imported from either China or Vietnam from trusted, vetted partners who stand by our strict quality standards."

Four things fall out of that paragraph. The seasoned iron and the carbon steel are American with no hedge attached. The enamel comes in two lines rather than one, which almost nobody who repeats the "made in America" line seems to know. The imported line has a country of origin the company declines to narrow — either China or Vietnam is the phrasing of a buyer working with more than one plant, or of a buyer who would rather not name which. And the exception has a name, which makes it a thing you can count instead of a vague misgiving. It is called Essential Enamel. An eleven-inch skillet of it lists at $59.95.

For years the explanation offered on the company's older FAQ ran roughly like this: Lodge had exhausted its search for an American plant capable of putting bright color enamel on cast iron, found a Chinese partner that could meet its standards, hired an American-owned third-party inspection firm to watch the line, sent senior managers over several times a year, and ran FDA test procedures for lead and cadmium. I could not open the original page — two FAQ URLs returned empty — so that is a summary of secondhand copies rather than a quotation, and I would not build an argument on it.

Which raises the question this piece exists to answer. What does an unbroken set of six answers actually cost, and who has been paying it?

More than 85 percent, as of 2018

Lee Riddle was fifty-one, and the fifth-generation vice president of sales, when a reporter from Family Business Magazine came through in 2018. He laid out the arrangement without being coy about it. The all-cast-iron pans are made in the United States. The enameled cast iron is bought from China. Accessories and steel come from China as well. "More than 85% of the company's production takes place in the States," he said.

That single sentence is the only quantity of its kind on the record. Everything else written about the size of Lodge's foreign purchasing, including much of what you will read this week, is inference dressed up as reporting.

So handle it carefully. "More than 85 percent" sets a floor and not a value, and the floor implies a ceiling on the other side: at most fifteen. Whether production means dollars or units, Riddle did not say, and I cannot tell from anything else in the record. And the sentence is eight years old. It predates the $56 million expansion the state of Tennessee announced in October 2021, and it predates the enamel plant that opened in 2023. The domestic share has very likely gone up since. No one at the company has said so with a number, and I could not find one anywhere else.

Eight years is a long time for a percentage to sit unrefreshed while a brand is sold on it.

Eight million dollars to buy back half a box

Then, in June 2023, Lodge did something odd for a company that had been importing that line for eighteen years. It brought the line home — half of it, anyway. Workers repurposed an existing building on the South Pittsburg campus, the company put $8 million into it, twenty-one people were hired, and the payroll went to 489. The first American-made color enamel cookware, cast and finished in the town where the founder built his house. Three colors: Cherry On Top, Cloud Nine, Smooth Sailing. Red, ivory, blue. Four sizes from three quarts to seven and a half. The launch price started at $220.

Set that $8 million against the other two numbers on the same campus. The second foundry that opened in 2017 was described in the local press two years later as "the $90 million foundry it built two years ago." The 2021 expansion the governor's office announced came to $56 million and 239 promised jobs. Add the first two and you get $146 million, and the enamel plant is a little over five percent of it — my arithmetic. Smallest check on the site. Largest thing it bought.

Because the reason the line had been abroad in the first place was never a secret, and the man who runs the process will tell you in one sentence. "Cast iron is a difficult material to apply enamel to," said Kevin Rusch, Lodge's enamel process manager. "Wet enamel preparation and application are delicate processes, hard on systems and costly to operate and maintain." The process he described: each piece grit blasted three times, sprayed wet twice by an automated system and a third time by a person holding the gun, dried in a dehydration oven, then fired in a roller hearth furnace. Covid delayed the plant by two years. Nobody in the United States had built spray-enameled cast iron at scale before, so there was no production model to copy.

A $220 Dutch oven and a $59.95 skillet are not the same object and I am not going to divide one by the other. But put them side by side and you can see, roughly, why one line of pots spent eighteen years on a boat.

French brand, South African owner. French brand, German owner. American brand, seventy cousins who are not allowed to sell. The furnaces, though, never moved.

Two French pots and the men who own them

Now walk down the same aisle. The most French-looking object in an American kitchen is a Le Creuset cocotte, and its story is only French in the middle. Two Belgians started it: Armand De Saegher, who knew casting, and Octave Aubecq, who knew enamel. They chose Fresnoy-le-Grand in 1925 because the routes for iron, coke and sand crossed there. The first cocotte came out that year in a color called Flame. Raymond Loewy designed a pot for them in 1958. And in 1988 the company was bought by Paul van Zuydam, a South African, who at eighty-seven in January 2026 was ranked by Forbes among his country's dollar billionaires with a net worth around $1.6 billion. He told the Wall Street Journal his company turns over about $850 million a year.

Staub is Alsatian, and German. Zwilling J.A. Henckels bought Groupe Staub in April 2008, a month after buying Demeyere of Belgium. Zwilling itself has belonged since 1970 to Werhahn KG of Neuss, a private family holding company.

So the shelf reads: French brand, South African owner. French brand, German owner. American brand, seventy cousins who are not allowed to sell.

Here is the strongest version of the case against everything that sentence implies, and it deserves better than a straw man. Le Creuset still casts every piece of its cast iron at Fresnoy-le-Grand. Staub kept its French production after the German purchase. If the test of a national object is the floor where the metal gets poured, both French brands pass it without an asterisk, and the American brand has a line that fails it. A South African billionaire has not moved a single French furnace in thirty-eight years — my subtraction from 1988 — while a Tennessee family has been shipping enamel across an ocean since 2005. Ownership is a weak proxy for anything you can hold in your hand.

That argument is correct, and it is an argument about five boxes. The sixth is where Lodge stops resembling anybody.

Twenty percent of pretax profit to the people who work there, ten to the family. In 2022 the family stopped its own dividend and left the employee share alone.

Twenty percent, and the year they paid it anyway

Mike Otterman is the first chief executive Lodge has ever hired from outside the family. He joined in 2016 to run sales and marketing, became president and chief operating officer in the summer of 2017, and took the top job in 2018 or 2019 depending on which account you take — the Journal says 2018, the Chattanooga paper announced it in February 2019, and I am not going to pretend the record is clean. In August 2026 he told the Journal how the money is split.

A tenth of pretax profit becomes the shareholders' dividend. Twenty percent of pretax profit goes to the people who work there: half into quarterly bonus pools, half into their retirement accounts. The program replaced a company pension in the late 1980s.

Read the two numbers together. The employees get twice what the owners get — my division, their structure — and thirty cents of every pretax dollar leaves before the family or the tax collector sees it. Then came 2022. Demand fell as the pandemic receded, and the family suspended its own dividend that year to keep the employee profit-sharing intact.

That is the sixth box, and it is the only sentence in this series where a family chose to be paid less so the floor could be paid the same.

The rest of the box: about 570 people now, close to the pandemic-era high, the largest employer in Marion County, with three or four generations of some families on the books. Jerry Don King started at eighteen and had been there thirty-nine years when a reporter for The Bitter Southerner found him. "My father's father worked here. He retired here. My father and his brother retired here. I've had several uncles that's worked here. I've got a brother that works here right now. Practically the biggest part of the King family has worked at Lodge Manufacturing Company. I think I'm probably the third generation of our family here." His nephew was on the second-shift packing line, making four.

The company's careers page carries a line from Lajuania Lovelady in packaging: "When I used to walk to school, I walked past the foundry every day, but I never thought I'd be working here. Now, I've been here 30-something years, and I love my job." The same page lists what comes with the job: medical, dental, vision, prescription, life and short-term disability insurance, an on-site clinic and fitness center, 401(k) matching, quarterly and deferred profit sharing, scholarships, a boot allowance, and tuition reimbursement at 100 percent of fees and books up to $250 a credit hour. The clinic covers more than 500 employees and family members. In 2023 more than 44 percent of the staff took a free annual physical. In 2024 the foundries passed a million hours without a lost-time injury, one of two American foundries the American Foundry Society recognized for it that year.

What nobody publishes is what any of it pays. Lodge has never stated an hourly wage and no government filing carries one; the figures circulating online come from job-board scrapes that contradict each other on the same page, $14.23 in one line and $23.03 to $32.24 in the next. Whether the foundry floor is organized I also could not establish — no election record, no contract, no announcement from either direction. Two elementary questions about the sixth box, and I can answer neither.

Seventy owners, none of them large

About seventy family shareholders come to the annual meeting each June. The wider clan runs to roughly 150 people and gathers every five years at the company's expense. Most of the seventy hold less than one percent each; three hold more than five. Everyone has signed an agreement that keeps the stock inside the family — spouses and adopted children count, and so do trusts with family beneficiaries — which means there is no legal route by which a share reaches a stranger.

Compare that to the same picture in 2018, when Family Business Magazine counted 47 shareholders and reported that no one person owned more than 20 percent. Eight years later there are 70, an increase of 23 owners or about 49 percent, my arithmetic, and the largest position has come down from under a fifth to just over a twentieth. Gifts and inheritances keep splitting the stock, and every split makes the block smaller and the family bigger.

The mechanism is not concentration. It is illiquidity.

"It wouldn't be the same business if the family doesn't remain connected to it," said Jay Daniel, a fifth-generation software founder who chairs the board. "As a private company, we get to think about the next quarter-century and not the next quarter."

That sentence is easy to say and expensive to mean, so look at what it costs a family member to get a seat. Board vacancies draw multiple applicants. There are two rounds of interviews; one person told the Journal his ran four hours. Among the questions Richard Millhiser, fifty-six, a former engineer now a stay-at-home parent and fencing coach, had to answer: how would you handle your mother? His mother is Carolyn Millhiser, eighty-six, the family's self-appointed historian, who lives in the house the founder built in 1877. "My mother is very passionate about Lodge and very opinionated," he said. "My answer was along the lines of, 'I've been disagreeing with my mother my entire life.'" Told what he had said, she was unimpressed. "I think that's a little extreme… He was raised to think and do his own thing and his brother was, too."

He got the seat.

Wall Street has come knocking, and Carolyn Millhiser gave the shortest possible account of it. Asked whether investment bankers show up when you make something this widely consumed, she said: "They've tried." Asked how the family resisted, she was less crisp. "I don't know. We just… It was in our ethic. Not only are we fourth-, going on fifth-generation owners, but the employees are also third- and fourth-generation employees. You know, we're part of the fiber of this town. We're the only real business that's been here for a long time. We're the only one that's really left, and I don't think we've ever thought about selling."

The year they thought it was finished

None of this was inevitable, and 1996 is the proof. The family gathered in South Pittsburg that year to celebrate a century in business. Henry Lodge, then the chief operating officer, spent the celebration worried the company might fold. Sarah Lodge Tally, now a retired lawyer and a company director, has said her parents urged her, growing up, to look for work somewhere else.

What turned it was a manufacturing decision, not a marketing one. Bob Kellermann led the effort to season every pan in the foundry, and in 2002 the process was finished. Until then a customer bought a pan coated in wax, peeled the wax off, and baked the thing in an oven for hours before cooking anything in it. After 2002 the pan came ready. It was an industry first and it is now the industry standard. By 2007 everything Lodge shipped went out seasoned. The 2008 crash sent people back into their kitchens and the 10.25-inch skillet, at $29.95, went vertical; one director called the years that followed hockey-stick growth. Revenue has grown more than tenfold since 2002, Otterman told the Journal, and he declined to give a profit figure or a valuation. So the most basic financial fact about this company is unavailable, and the numbers you will find online come from data brokers whose two leading estimates differ by nearly a factor of three. I am not going to repeat either.

The decision that saved the company also broke something, which is the part I find most useful. Seasoning a pan in the plant leaves one caramelized bead of oil at its lowest point. Knock the bead off and it leaves a brown mark. Customers read the mark as rust and sent the pans back, so returns went up right after the fix. The fix for the fix, as The Bitter Southerner described it, was to put a person at the end of the line with a torch, burning off the beads one pan at a time. The job rotates, and whoever is sitting there that day is called the Bubble Boy or the Bubble Girl.

That is what "made in America" looks like when you get close enough to see it. It is a chair, a torch, and a rotation.

Two more details from the same reporting, both from around 2016 and both from company staff rather than a published document. Anyone on the floor, in any department, can pull a skillet off the line and throw it in the scrap pile right up to the moment of packing, and more than ten percent of a day's output goes back to the raw pile that way — some days fourteen. And a technical service manager put the consumer return rate at 0.03 percent, which is one pan in 33,333, my division. That figure has been quoted for a decade. Lodge has never published it.

Melted and poured

One more box, and it is not one of the six. In April 2026 the metal tariffs were rewritten so that the duty falls on an item's full customs value instead of the value of the metal in it. Buried in the structure is a clause worth reading twice: a derivative product made abroad, but made from metal melted and poured in the United States, is charged ten percent. In June the threshold for how much of the metal has to be American came down from 95 percent to 85.

Lodge melts and pours in South Pittsburg. The clause reads like it was written with a foundry in mind.

It is also the clause that catches Lodge coming the other way, because Lodge is an importer too — of Essential Enamel, and of accessories, and of steel by Riddle's 2018 account. Whether cast-iron cookware sits inside the annex or outside it I could not determine: I could not open the annex, and I found confident claims running both directions. So I will not say. In April 2025 Otterman went on CBS News under a headline quoting him to the effect that tariffs are "positive long-term," with challenges remaining. I have not seen a transcript of the rest, and six words in a headline are not an argument.

Around 2015 the White House gave Lodge a Presidential "E" Award, which goes to companies that succeed at exporting American-made goods. A company that wins a prize for shipping American iron out, and pays duty on enamel coming in, is not a simple object.

What has not been counted

Add it up. Born in South Pittsburg. Incorporated in South Pittsburg. Headquartered in South Pittsburg. Owned by seventy relatives who cannot sell to anyone outside the family. Cast in two foundries and an enamel plant inside the same town limits. Paying about 570 people, twenty percent of pretax profit before dividends, in a place with 3,106 residents at the last census — and the employees do not all live inside those town lines, so read the two numbers as scale and not as a ratio.

Five and a half boxes, then. The half is called Essential Enamel and its address is printed on the company's own website.

And the rest is uncounted. How large the imported share is now: unknown, because the only figure is Riddle's from 2018. Where the pig iron is bought: unknown, because the reporting says only that Lodge melts pig iron and recycled steel. What the foundry pays an hour: unknown. Whether the floor is unionized: unknown. What the company earns: withheld by the chief executive, on the record, politely.

Purity has a price, is the honest summary, and this company paid most of it and then wrote down where it saved the rest. That last part is rarer than the first. Plenty of firms are made in America. Very few will tell you, on the page where you are choosing a pan, which line is not.

Bob Kellermann ran the place from 1988 to 2001 and stayed on as chairman emeritus until the end of 2017. Asked once why he cared so much, he could not answer. "Lodge couldn't be made in New York City," he said. "We are proud that we are made here in this little teeny town in Tennessee and been a member of the community for all these years." Then the reporter watched something he said he had never seen in twenty years of interviewing chief executives: Bob Kellermann began to cry. Why does it matter so much to you? "It is hard to put into words." Could you try? "Not at the moment."

On the evening of June 23, 1867, in Jackson, Tennessee, the man who would build the foundry sat down and added up his walking. He got twelve hundred miles. Then he wrote down the rest of it anyway: besides little short trips I have not counted.