Arlington

Arlington, in full the Arlington Briar Pipes Corporation, is an American pipe workshop founded in 1919 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Its name usually stays in the background of pipe history because it rarely appeared on the pipes it made: the company's real business was not selling under its own brand but filling other firms' orders. Records indicate the workshop operated at the same Brooklyn address for close to sixty years.

Working as a Subcontracting Workshop

Arlington's operation is a typical example of a model common in the twentieth-century American pipe industry. The factory worked briar blocks and finished the pipe, but the product came to market under the stamp of the tobacconist or brand that had placed the order. As a result, most of the pipes the company made circulate today under other names.

Among the brand names the company used for itself, besides Arlington, are Briarlee, Firethorn, Kimberly, Krona, and Olde London; dozens more names were added to these over time. Despite this abundance of names, the only one on record as having been formally registered is Arlington: the application filed in 1962 is reported to have been finalized in 1964. Most of the remaining names appear to have been used simply as stamps, without registration being deemed necessary.

Known Business Relationships

According to accounts, the workshop turned pipes in the 1950s for Wilke, one of New York's established tobacconists; the fact that Wilke-stamped pipes came from different manufacturers in different periods shows the ongoing nature of such contracts. It is also often said within the community that some Jobey pipes came from Arlington's hands, though which years this covers has not been documented. Because most of these relationships were contractual, they left no written trace; much of the information rests on collector observation.

Management and Closure

The only comprehensive account we have of who ran the company is José Manuel Lopes's 2005 brand compilation. In this compilation, the name Ludwig Rosenberger is associated with the recovery period of the 1940s, and the final phase of continued production with the 1970s; Jack Uhle is also counted among the names connected to the company. The same source notes that Rosenberger's son, Mel Rosenberger, later founded his own brand under the name DiMonte. None of these names has been cross-checked against an independent registry record, and since they rest on a single source, they should be read with caution. Records also note that a company employee, Jack Kaye, obtained a design patent unrelated to pipes in 1967.

The same records state that the Arlington Briar Pipes Corporation was deemed inactive and struck from the New York state register at the end of 1978. Arlington-stamped pipes are rarely seen in secondhand circulation today; the examples restorers take on are mostly large-bodied, thick-walled models, some of which are grooved-finish Rhodesian shapes. The threaded metal tenon fitting used at the stem joint is also a frequently noted detail of these pipes. The stamp itself often does not by itself provide sufficient identification; because pipes likely to have come from the same workshop can appear under six or seven different names, Arlington should be thought of, from a collecting standpoint, not as a single brand but as a production address.