I most closely associate Sierra Vista Ceramics with cookie jars, and I think most folks would know them from the cookie jar collector’s references. A quick search shows most results coming back for those, although I know they also made things like lazy susans. According to Chipman’s Scrapbook the pottery was established by Reinhold Lenaberg (Lehner’s Marks has the name “LenabUrg”) and both his sons Leonard and William were involved in the business, with Leonard later taking the helm. Other than that, there isn’t much information on the company.

Most interesting to me is the location of their shop on Fair Oaks Ave in Pasadena, cross street was Washington Blvd. I know this area fairly well and it’s fairly close to the Rose Bowl as well as several antique stores to the south. One of their specialties seems to have been a rather sinister looking clown head cookie jar, but they also had less scary looking ones like a telephone, pig and chicken. I believe that some of the cookie jars may be partially marked as Starnes since they were distributed by Walter Starnes, a dealer in downtown Los Angeles. You might want to keep that in mind when searching for them. Otherwise, they are usually marked with the company name - “Sierra Vista”, along with “California”.

Note: We've tried to provide as much info as possible on this pottery maker or artist. For further info, you may want to research the items they have on Ebay listed under this name. We've tried to hand tailor the searches below so they will bring up the most accurate results. If there are no results, it will list general California pottery.