BATON ROUGE, La. (Aging Untold)— Clayton Mitchell has transformed his passion for cast-iron cookware into the country’s second-largest collection, and it is housed in a custom-built 8,000-square-foot climate-controlled building in Baton Rouge.
For more than 25 years, Mitchell has searched flea markets, eBay and old hardware stores across the country, amassing close to 7,000 pieces of cast-iron cookware.
“I started going to these flea markets, met so many of these cool people, and about 10 years down the road, you figured out it’s about the people more than it was about the pots,” Mitchell said.
Collection outgrew multiple storage spaces
The collection eventually overwhelmed Mitchell’s living space…