LHS (L&H Stern)

LHS is the pipe brand of the L&H Stern firm, which manufactured in Brooklyn during the first half of the twentieth century. The name comes from the initials of the two brothers who founded the firm: Ludwig and Hugo Stern. The brand was known not for one-off handmade pipes but for spreading a broad range of grades and models across the country through a wholesale network. It is one of the brands in which the American series-production tradition, and the shock the briar trade experienced during the war years, can be read most clearly.

Founding and the Brooklyn Workshop

Ludwig Stern's work as a pipe manufacturer, according to records, goes back to 1893. Together with his brother Hugo he reorganized the business and opened a joint factory in 1911; the firm was known as L&H Stern Smoking Pipes & Holders. Production moved into a six-story building at the corner of Pearl and Water Streets in Brooklyn. This location, right beneath the Manhattan Bridge, was no accident: under the era's wholesale-tobacco conventions, buyers wanted to see the factory in person before placing an order, and an address caught between two bridges was an easy destination for merchants coming from outside the city.

The firm's distinguishing trait was gathering almost the entire process under one roof: woodworking, mouthpiece production, and silver and other metal bands were all prepared in the same building. Bodies in woods other than briar were made alongside it. One of the materials the firm used for mouthpieces was Redmanol; this phenolic resin, named for the company Lawrence V. Redman founded in Chicago in 1913, is counted as the first serious industrial substitute for genuine amber, with its clear amber color. In the history of mouthpiece materials, this shift marks one of the turning points in the move from natural resin to synthetic material.

Grades and Series

LHS worked not with a single quality level but with a tiered sequence of grades. By one account, a magazine listing dated 1944 laid out the brand's eight grades: at the top, Sterncrest Ultrafine, then Sterncrest 14K and Sterncrest Sterling; in the middle tier, Certified Purex and Select Grain; at the lower tier, Silvercrest, Superfine Purex, and Sculpted Purex. That same year's catalogue also lists lines named Barrister, Marwyn, Park Lane, Radmanol, and Warwick. Some late-period Sterncrest examples carried silver bands, others 14-karat gold bands.

There were also more modest lines where the firm's name did not appear directly; the names Leader and New Art are associated with such products. LHS also supplied the American university graduation-pipe tradition; a 1954 Yale class pipe, considered within the scope of College Class Pipes, is a known example.

War Years and Stamps

The brand became one of the primary manufacturers supplying pipes to American soldiers during the Second World War. Because surviving examples of the same model exist from before, during, and after the war, the brand shows, step by step, what a shortage of materials did to a workshop. The most practical way to make the distinction is by the stamps. Pre-war pipes carry "Real Briar Root" or, more briefly, "Briar Root." When the flow of root shipments from the Mediterranean was cut off with the war, LHS turned, like many American manufacturers, to domestic wood; the bodies of those years often carry no stamp about material at all, because there was nothing left to boast about regarding origin. The "Imported Briar" wording that came into use after peace returned is, in a sense, an announcement of a return. The wider industry traces of the same shock can also be seen under the heading of the briar trade's forgotten manufacturers.

The firm's production ended around 1960. Today LHS pipes are regularly examined by collectors, since they are well suited to comparing the pre- and post-war periods of American mid-range briar.