Lenox Company

As one of the founding partners in 1889 of the Ceramic Art Company, Walter Scott Lenox was spurred by President Theodore Roosevelt’s complaint in 1902 that he could not buy top-quality dishes for the White House from any American manufacturer. By 1906 Lenox was the sole owner of the renamed Lenox Company of Trenton, New Jersey, where he quickly perfected a fine china comparable to its European rivals. When President Woodrow Wilson went shopping for White House china in 1918, he commissioned Lenox to manufacture the first White House service “designed by an American artist, made from American clay at an American pottery, burned at American kilns, and decorated by American workmen.” Since then, Lenox has supplied all state-dinner services to the White House and is widely considered the preeminent American luxury china manufacturer.