Though this pattern was made in other colors, my collection is strictly of the Brown multicolor pattern. The pattern was engraved by hand on a Copper plate, and this served as the "master" to make stencils from. The pattern stencils were applied manually to the piece then the article is fired at 1472 degrees in order to set the decoration. Then as in the Old Mill design, hand tinting is added, and the Glaze covers it all. The small colored marks you see on the bottoms of pieces, in the vicinity of the logo on the bottom, are the tinting artists signature.

   Oftentimes I see people describe a piece as having 3 small "blemishes" on the back. These are normal and are simply the marks left by the support pins when the glaze was applied, and the final firing was done. It will be found on most pieces, and is normal.

   The Old Mill Pattern was manufactured from 1952 until 1977, at which time all molds, stencils, and records were destroyed. That was Johnson Brothers policy perhaps to avoid falling into the wrong hands and being duplicated by a competitor.

   The upper "2" is printed with solid color, where the lower "2" character is a dot matrix pattern. This would indicate they did not both come from the same master copper plate. On close comparison it can be seen they are different from each other in other ways.