The Last Flatware Factory in America

Every drawer in America has a fork in it, and almost none of those forks were made here. Flatware was one of the first consumer goods to leave the country wholesale, and it left so completely that the category now has exactly one domestic manufacturer — not one leading manufacturer, one manufacturer. It operates out of the building in Sherrill, New York where Oneida Limited made silverware for a century, and it exists because in 2005 two Oneida employees bought the plant their employer was closing. Whether you should own this particular twenty-piece set is a real question with real caveats. Whether it is the last American fork is not a question at all.

We verify manufacturing against primary sources, read what actual owners report, and never accept payment for rankings.

Before anything else, a warning about the small print, because this pattern is sold under two nearly identical names and the difference is one digit in a part number.

Which one is this, exactly?

Liberty Tabletop groups Annapolis into a single collection it titles “Annapolis (Satin or Bright).” That title does real damage, because it reads like a finish option on one product. It is not. Mirror and satin are separate patterns with separate part numbers, separate inventory and separate listings everywhere they are sold. From the maker’s own catalogue:

• SKU 2332S020A is the set reviewed here — Annapolis, 20 pieces, brilliant mirror finish. Every mirror-finish Annapolis piece starts 2332.
• SKU 2333S020A is its satin twin — the same outline, the same steel, the same set contents, brushed rather than polished. Every satin Annapolis piece starts 2333. If you buy one four-piece place setting in mirror and one in satin, you will own two patterns, not one.
• The set sizes are their own part numbers too: 2332S020A (20 pieces, service for four), 2332S024A (24 pieces, a three-piece basic service for eight — no salad fork), 2332S040A (40, service for eight), 2332S045A (45, service for eight plus a five-piece serving set), 2332S060A (60, service for twelve), 2332S065A and 2332S068A above that.

What is actually in the 20-piece box: four dinner knives, four dinner forks, four salad forks, four place spoons and four teaspoons — five pieces each for four people. Note what is not in it. There are no soup spoons; Liberty sells those separately in sets of four, and a place spoon is not a soup spoon. There are no serving pieces at all. If you want a ladle, a serving spoon or a cold-meat fork you buy them as open stock, which is also how you replace the teaspoon that leaves the house in a lunch bag and never comes back.

What it’s like to use

Annapolis is a teardrop outline with no ornament on it — no scrollwork, no ridged shoulders, nothing for food to sit in. That is a design decision with a practical consequence one long-time owner named better than a spec sheet could: there are “no decorative indentations, making them extremely easy to wash/clean.” Plain patterns wash cleanly. Ornate ones hold egg.

The sizing is Euro, and that word means something specific here. Liberty publishes three sizing standards on its own FAQ page and defines all three: American sizing (also called colonial), with a dinner fork around 7¼ inches; Euro sizing, “larger, heavier, and more substantial,” with a dinner fork around 8 to 8¼ inches and noticeably wider across the tines; and Liberty sizing, an in-house standard that splits the difference. Annapolis is Euro. Its dinner fork measures 8¼ inches and its dinner knife 9 inches — the top of the maker’s own range. Anyone who has only ever owned supermarket flatware will find these longer than what they are replacing.

The knife is the most interesting piece in the box. Liberty makes both hollow-handle and solid-handle dinner knives, and publishes the weights of each: hollow handles, built from two half shells joined together and filled with resin or cement, run about 2.7 to 2.8 ounces; solid handles, “forged from a single piece of stainless steel… no seams, solder joints, fillers, or connecting materials,” run about 4.0 to 4.1 ounces. The Annapolis dinner knife is listed at 3.8 ounces and the product page describes “forged dinner knife construction with serrated blade.” Read those together and this knife sits at the solid-handle end of Liberty’s own published range — the maker does not label the Annapolis knife by handle type anywhere we could find, so we are reading its weight and its wording rather than a statement, but a hollow-handle knife it is not. A one-piece knife has no seam to open and no filler to loosen, which is the failure mode that eventually kills cheap flatware.

Everything else is 18/10 and behaves like it. Eighteen percent chromium, ten percent nickel, which is what buys the corrosion resistance and the shine that survives a dishwasher. Liberty’s instruction is to rinse after use and avoid detergents containing chlorine or citrus additives — both attack stainless over time — and to reach for a cleaner like Bar Keepers Friend if hard water or tea leaves a film. Owners consistently report the set comes out of the dishwasher still bright, which for a mirror finish is the whole test.

The gauge question

There is one thing this set is not, and the maker says so itself if you read carefully. Asked on its own FAQ what separates its quality lines, Liberty answers: “All Liberty Tabletop flatware is manufactured from the same premium 18/10 stainless steel. As you move through our quality lines, the gauge (thickness) of the steel increases, pattern designs become more intricate, and finishing processes become more refined.”

So gauge is a line-by-line variable at this company, and Annapolis is one of its most popular, most accessible patterns rather than one of its premium ones. Liberty does not publish which quality line Annapolis belongs to, and it does not publish a gauge figure for it — we looked, and could not find either. That silence is the single most useful thing in this review, because it explains the one substantive complaint owners make, which is coming up next. Weight tells you nothing about length: a fork can be Euro-long and still be thinner through the handle than a restaurant fork.

What owners actually say

Start with the honest problem: the owner pool is small. This set carries 247 ratings, and on this site that is unusually thin — most products we review carry thousands. It is not thin because the set is new or obscure. It is thin because the brand-wide ceiling is low: sort every Liberty Tabletop listing by review count and this Annapolis set is the top of the catalogue. There is one factory, one shift of American labor, no mass-retail distribution and a great deal of direct-to-consumer selling that never generates a public review at all. We normally require several hundred owner ratings before we will write about a product; we made an exception here because a category with exactly one domestic manufacturer left cannot be covered at all under a rule built for categories with fifty. Read the numbers below knowing the sample is a few hundred people, not a few thousand.

The average is 4.4 out of 5, but the shape underneath it is unusual: 74% five-star, 9% four-star, 6% three-star, 2% two-star — and 9% one-star. That is a barbell, not a bell curve. A nine-percent one-star share sitting under a 4.4 average almost always means a small number of people had a specific bad experience rather than a general mild disappointment, and that is exactly what the text shows.

The most serious complaint is black residue, and here the maker’s own FAQ is the key to reading it. A one-star owner in May 2026: “I followed the instructions and soaked and handwashed prior to using. After the first time through the dishwasher the knives had black particles that transfered to the food.” Liberty addresses this directly on its FAQ page: “The black residue is typically a harmless polishing compound remaining from the final finishing process. It can be removed by soaking the flatware in warm, soapy water for 15–20 minutes and washing normally.” So a little black residue on brand-new flatware is a known artifact of polishing, the maker says so, and the fix is a twenty-minute soak. That is the quirk. What that owner describes is the defect. He performed the prescribed soak, handwashed, and the particles still came off the knives and onto food afterward. At that point it is no longer polishing compound working its way off — it is a finishing failure on those pieces, it is covered, and the correct response is a return or a warranty claim rather than another soak. Do not live with it.

The second complaint is burrs, and it is the same finishing story with a sharper edge. A two-star owner: the shape is “nice, though basic,” but “during manufacturing, they created a burr on the end of every table spoon and a couple of the other pieces (maybe during polishing)… I also had to spend 10 minutes on each piece sanding out the sharp edges. I really hate finishing someone else’s job on things I paid for.” He is right to be annoyed and right about the cause. A burr on the end of a spoon handle is not a design characteristic, it is a piece that skipped a step, and a company charging what this one charges on the strength of its craftsmanship should not be shipping it. It is also, again, a warranty matter and not a sanding project. Note that both of the finishing complaints land on polishing — not on the steel, not on the knives coming apart, not on tines bending. There is no failure-in-use pattern anywhere in this pool.

The third complaint is the one to take seriously before you buy, because it is nobody’s fault. A three-star owner in February 2026 bought two of these sets to replace an old service and wrote: “I had no idea how thin the metal was going to be, or how relatively short and light the pieces are in adult hands. The pattern is very simple which is what I wanted and the pieces seem to be of good quality. I’ve been using all of the items exclusively for about two weeks and I am struggling with returning them, or not. This Annapolis set would be great for those starting out in life, thinking perhaps one day they would upgrade to something more substantial.” That is a fair, careful, non-angry review and it lines up precisely with what the maker says about gauge varying by quality line. Annapolis is Euro length and accessible-line thickness, and if what you are picturing when you think “good flatware” is heft in the handle, this may not deliver it. Liberty sells heavier lines; it also sells samples of individual pieces specifically so you can settle this in your hand before committing.

The rest is mild. A four-star owner who already owned an earlier Liberty pattern — “It had a ship’s wheel on them. They were beautiful and shiny and still are after quite a lot of use” — was “a little disappointed in these” by comparison, without saying why. And cost comes up constantly, always in the same shape: this set costs several times what the imported twenty-piece sets sitting beside it cost, every owner who mentions it knows that, and nearly all of them treat it as the point rather than the objection. “It is slightly more expensive than some of the other options,” wrote one, “but worth it when considering quality.”

The praise is consistent and worth stating plainly: weight described as substantial without being bulky, a finish that stays bright through the dishwasher, edges and tines that are smooth on the great majority of sets, and a strong sense among owners that this is a buy-once purchase. One owner who bought several competing four-piece samples side by side to compare found that the others “had some relatively rough edges at the base of the prongs” while this set, “made in the U.S., is manufactured to higher standards, and are smooth and sleek and a pleasure to use.” The same owner adds a useful correction to the photography: although product images make the mirror finish look matte, in person the pieces are “semi-glossy and reflective but not with the cheap shiny look.”

Made in USA Verification

Specifications

How it compares

The real competition for this set is not another American brand, because there is no other American brand. It is the other ways to buy the same steel out of the same building.

Read across that table and the decision is mostly about how many people sit at your table and whether you want a finish that shines or a finish that forgives. Mirror is the more formal look and the more honest one — it shows every water spot, which in hard-water houses is a real consideration and the reason Liberty tells you to dry promptly. Satin hides spots and light scratching. If you are outfitting a table for eight, the 45-piece set is the better buy per piece and arrives with serving pieces the 20-piece set does not include. And whichever you choose, remember open stock: you are not locked into a set size, because every piece in this pattern can be bought one at a time for as long as the pattern is made.

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Pros & Cons

Pros: An unqualified, per-product Made-in-the-USA claim written on the maker’s own product page, backed by a named street address in a building that has made flatware for over a century; a steel statement most companies will not make, requiring not just American mills but American melt; the only stainless flatware manufacturer left in the United States, which makes this the only way to buy a domestically made fork at all; a 25-year warranty against manufacturing defects plus a 30-day return on unused product; a genuinely forged dinner knife whose published weight sits at the solid-handle end of the maker’s own range, with no seam or filler to fail; Euro sizing at the top of Liberty’s three standards, so the pieces are longer than what most people are replacing; a plain teardrop outline with no ornament to trap food, which owners specifically praise as easy to clean; a mirror finish that survives the dishwasher and reads semi-gloss rather than cheap-bright in person; full open stock, so a lost teaspoon is a replacement and not a mismatched drawer; and a company history — two employees buying the plant their employer was closing — that is the actual reason this category still exists.

Cons: The owner pool is small at 247 ratings and cannot be made bigger, because the brand’s single highest-reviewed product is this one and nothing in the catalogue reaches five hundred; the one-star share is nine percent, high for a 4.4 average, and every one of those complaints lands on finishing — black polishing residue that survived the maker’s own prescribed soak and transferred to food, and burrs on the ends of spoon handles that an owner had to sand off himself; Liberty does not publish a steel gauge for Annapolis or say which of its quality lines the pattern belongs to, while separately confirming that gauge increases as you move up those lines, which is a real gap for anyone deciding by feel; at least one careful owner found the pieces thinner and lighter than expected and called it a set for people starting out rather than a final purchase; the collection is titled “Annapolis (Satin or Bright)” as if finish were an option on one product when mirror and satin are separate part numbers that will not match in a drawer; there are no soup spoons and no serving pieces in the box; mirror finish shows every hard-water spot; and it costs several times what the imported sets beside it cost, which is the trade and should be understood as one.