Andrew Jackson Jordan was born at New Windsor, near Baltimore, Maryland, in 1845, the son of Hiram and Margaret Hopkins Jordan.  He established a cutlery retailing business in St Louis in 1871, which at first imported German goods.   Jordan liked quality in cutlery and that led him to look elsewhere.  ‘His trade was almost entirely in America, but it was in Sheffield that he established his factory, as he wished to deal only in first-class Sheffield goods’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1929).   In 1885, he started his own business in the town, first in Radford Street, and then in the more substantial East India Works in Baker’s Hill.  By the end of the 1880s, he is said to have employed about 120 skilled workers, who were kept busy making and shipping orders to his St Louis showrooms at 612 Washington Avenue and 613 St Charles Street.  The St Louis premises apparently contained an acre of floor space, with popular lines in fine cases of cutlery, ladies’ and men’s travelling companions, and ladies’ work boxes (Sheffield Independent, 7 September 1889, quoting Iron Age).   By 1900, Jordan had moved to a larger factory in Furnival Street.   He was agent for an early American version of the safety razor – the ‘Star’ – made by Kampfe Bros.  He also continued to have cutlery made in Germany.

Unusually for an American, Jordan ‘specialised in hand-made goods and would not deal in machine-made articles’.   His speciality was kitchen and butchers’ knives, which he described in his catalogues as ‘The Best on Earth’:   

Although his was an era of grossly exaggerated advertising claims, this claim, as far as I can tell, was true.   All Jordan kitchen and butcher knives have ‘seasoned Persian boxwood handles’.   This costly wood is a light golden color, takes a high polish and wears almost like iron.   Many of his handle and blades shapes are original and distinctive.   Jordan kitchen knives are light in weight, and they do not have bolsters.   For his blades Jordan used a special formula of double shear steel.   Jordan acknowledged that cast steel was superior to shear steel, but he asserted that his shear steel was better than any other steel, and his knives seem to prove this point (Levine, 1997¹).

Jordan’s ‘A1’ mark was granted by the Company of Cutlers in 1840.  His ‘AAA1’ mark was registered in Washington in 1887.  The Sheffield Independent, 10 April 1888, reported that the A1 mark was disputed by Charles Chambers & Co (see Hiram Cutler, Son, & Chambers).  Jordan’s ‘OLD FAITHFUL’ mark for razors was granted in 1922.  Goins (1998)² stated that much of the firm’s business was with the Gros Ventre, Blood, Blackfeet and River Crow Indians.  Jordan split his time between Sheffield – where he resided for a period at Clarkson Street – and St Louis, where he lived in the luxury Southern Hotel.  In his absences, his brother Charles David Jordan (1851-1932) deputised.  The latter’s son, Clay Eugene Jordan (1877-1945), operated the Clay Cutlery Co in Andover, New York, between 1910 and 1920.   This plant had been managed by the Platt brothers of Sheffield (see Charles Platt) and was to become a useful source of cutlery for Jordan’s St Louis store.  Andrew Jordan left Sheffield for the last time in 1920.   He retired and the US business was renamed the C. D. Jordan Cutlery Co.  Jordan died at St Louis from arteriosclerosis on 3 June 1929, aged 83.  He was buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery in the city.  His Sheffield firm was still marketing razors, but it did not survive his passing.  The company’s history has been told by Pierce (2008)³.

^1. Levine, B, Levine’s Guide to Knives and Their Values (Northbrook, IL, 4th edn, 1997)

^2. Goins, J  E, and Goins, C, Goins’ Encyclopedia of Cutlery Markings (Indianapolis, 1998) 

^3. Pierce, C David, ‘Clay Cutlery Company and the AJ Jordan Empire’, Knife World (11 Nov 2008)