Before a New Jersey-born son of a Scottish farmer named John Landis Mason patented his jar in 1858, home-food preservation was a tricky affair. Modern heat-based canning, pioneered by a Frenchman in 1806, was too cumbersome for most home cooks, many of whom relied on cork-and-wax contraptions to seal food, often imperfectly, into vessels whose opaque walls rendered the contents invisible.
The Mason jar was different. With its threaded neck and screw-on lid, “the canner could form a seal as hot liquids cooled,” writes Mary Ellen Snodgrass in The Encyclopedia of Kitchen History. Mason jars, made of a manganese-bleached glass, were also transparent. “Being able to see what you have on hand and what’s going on inside the bottle, that’s what’s really important,” says Megan Elias, the author of “Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture.”
Mason never capitalized on his success. He assigned his patent rights to another company and died a charity case — the invention that bore his name helped spark a home-canning revolution that lasted until the 1950s.
By the early 20th century, industrial advances made jar manufacturing faster and more economical. Competitors like the Ball brothers were, according to Quentin Skrabec’s biography of H. J. Heinz, making mass-produced Mason jars widely available. Mason jars made it possible to preserve green beans and apples and peaches that could be eaten in January. Settlers in the Pacific Northwest filled the jars with wild huckleberries. “By autumn, every housewife had hundreds of quart and half-gallon jars stored in the basement or root cellar,” writes Paul Conkin in “A Revolution Down on the Farm.”
World War II caused another spike in Mason-jar production. The government, which had rationed foodstuffs and the tins used to hold them, encouraged Americans to cultivate victory gardenso and preserve what they grew at home. Between 1939 and 1949, Americans bought more than three million canning jars. But the Mason-jar heyday did not last. In the postwar years, Americans left farms for the suburbs and houses with refrigerators. Farmers learned how to freeze their bounty, and even in those days, Elias says, many didn’t live far from a supermarket.
Today original Mason jars are prized collectibles. There are lots of them, which, the historian Andrew F. Smith points out, “is a testament to the number of Mason jars that were in fact used.” In contemporary America, Mason jars are as likely to hold pencils as apricot jam. But home canning has gained traction among a certain class of urban locavores. “It’s kind of for the foodies,” Smith says.
“Do I think it’s a mass movement?” he adds. “No.”