A sharp business model Simplicity and quality have been the iconic knifemaker’s rule for more than a century. STORY AND PHOTOS BY JAMES PROFFITT
E
rnest “Mooney” Warther began carving with his first pocketknife at age 5. A dozen years later, in 1902, he crafted his mother a kitchen knife as a gift. Her friends and neighbors liked it, so he made more. These days, 120 years later, Dover-based Warther Cutlery is still making knives the way Mooney did — one at a time and by hand. And mothers (and everyone else) still love them. American steel, American hardware, American wood, Ohio labor, and blades with an amazingly attractive (trademarked since 1907) finish pattern create loyal customers who return regularly to add to their collections. If you visit the company’s new 15,000-square-foot showroom, factory, and office, you’ll find plenty of American-made kitchen products, including cookware and a small army of specialty foods, spices, and condiments. But you’ll quickly see that knives made by fourthgeneration craftsmen are the star of the show. The beautiful birch-handled knives come in many shapes and sizes. The most striking feature of the knives is the finish pattern on the blades. Each one is painstakingly tooled by hand — a 7-inch chef’s knife boasts more than 150 individual circular tooling patterns. Jeanie Nadeau was a tour guide up until just a few years ago, and even though she’s retired, she’s still enthusiastically promoting Warther. She says during her
24 OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • DECEMBER 2021
years at Warther, plenty of folks “snuck in” for a peek. “We would have makers come in here, knifemakers, and you could pick them out,” she says. “By the time the tour was done, I could tell it was somebody that wanted to know something, so I would approach them and they’d say, ‘Well, we’re from such-and-such cutlery and we just hear so much about this place and we just had to see it to believe it.’” Over the years, Warther knives have been presented to presidents and dignitaries, including presidents Reagan, Ford, and Bush (both); Ohio governors; and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. Fine cutlery isn’t the only family business. David Warther II handcrafts museum-quality pocketknives in the style of his grandfather Mooney and is a world-renowned ivory carver, having created 60-plus ships documenting the world’s maritime history. Some of the ships’ ropes measure just seven one-thousandths of an inch in diameter. You can see the collection at David Warther Carvings museum in nearby Sugarcreek. They also manufacture a complete line of cutting boards, butcher blocks, and knife storage systems from hardwoods like cherry, walnut, and maple — and in the tradition of Mooney Warther, wood-carving knives. Next door to Warther Cutlery is the Warther Museum, featuring the nearly complete collection of Mooney’s amazingly intricate, to-scale ebony, walnut, and ivory steam engines. Over the years, many tried to buy his
