Fischer (The House of Fischer)

Fischer, in full The House of Fischer, was an American pipe workshop that operated first in Buffalo, New York, and later in the neighboring town of Orchard Park. The Fischer family that ran the workshop is said to have learned the craft in Germany and to have carried it on for generations; production in America came to an end in the late 1970s. The brand belongs to the class of small-scale operations turning out work at a bench behind the shop, rather than the large American factories running mass production.

The Workshop's Course

The most concrete document on the workshop's operation is a 1956 promotional text, which states that the briar pipes were, without exception, bench-made. The family also worked with meerschaum pipes; this second line of work is the main source of the case of mistaken identity discussed below.

The claim that the shop opened in Buffalo in the 1890s rests solely on family tradition and is not documented. The Buffalo workshop closed in the late 1950s, and Arthur Fischer, who took over the business, moved production to his home in Orchard Park. Arthur Fischer, the last known member of the family in the trade, retired in 1978, and the shop closed the same year. Accounts of the Orchard Park period suggest that in this final stage the emphasis shifted from making new pipes toward repair and sales; the claim that some pipes from these years may have been made for the shop by an outside manufacturer has not been confirmed.

Stamps and Dating

The House of Fischer did not stamp its pipes with a date, so it is not possible to fix the year of manufacture for individual pieces. The only indirect clue that remains is the city name: early Buffalo-era pipes carry a looped "Buffalo" stamp beneath the brand name. This wording was dropped from the stamp in the early 1960s; a pipe bearing "Buffalo" can therefore be dated roughly earlier, and one without it, later. Since this clue provides only a rough before-and-after distinction, it is on its own insufficient and is weighed together with other indicators such as surface finish and stem shape.

Collector compilations also record grade names alongside the brand name: Supreme, Royal, Imperial, Golden 15, 15 Grand, 25 Grand, Ramsgate, Deluxe, Special, and Seconds, meaning second-quality. A patent application is reported to have been filed for a model called the Texan. The name Margate was added to the list later. Whether these names formed a coherent quality hierarchy remains unclear, since no documentation survives from the workshop.

The Case of Mistaken Identity

The name Fischer is often confused in pipe literature because it points to more than one family. In the same years as the Buffalo briar workshop, the Austrian-born Gustav Fischer Sr. (1847-1937) was carving meerschaum pipes in Boston. Trained as an artist in Vienna, Fischer settled in Boston in 1893 and worked for the long-established tobacconist known as Ehrlich's; the pipes he carved reached the market under the shop's name rather than his own. There is no evidence of any family relationship between the two families. The significance of this distinction lies in the fact that Fischer-stamped pieces on the secondary market are frequently misattributed; a detailed example of the issue is discussed in the entry the fake meerschaum pipe attributed to Gustav Fischer. Today the brand can be traced only in collections and in compilations covering old American workshops.