Rivendell Pipes: Levi Zurcher's Short-Lived American Workshop

Rivendell Pipes is the name of a small pipe workshop run single-handedly by American Levi Zurcher in the early 2000s. The brand rested on neither a factory nor a corporate structure, and the pipes it produced never entered a wide distribution network. For this reason, Rivendell is counted not among the main names of the American handmade pipe scene but among the many independent workshops that briefly appeared and disappeared around its edges. What is known about the brand today amounts to little more than a few lines in a maker registry and a single promotional page the maker himself prepared; even the founding year has not been established with certainty.

The Maker

Zurcher graduated with honors from the zoology program at Northern Arizona University. In the fall of 2004, the only period in which the workshop's trace can be found, he was twenty-three — a notable detail in a craft where the average age tends to run quite high. Pipe making was never a full-time profession for him; it remained a pursuit fitted alongside his student years and the period following graduation.

In Rex Poggenpohl's compiled list of North American pipe makers, Zurcher appears under the name "Rivendell Pipes" with an address in Flagstaff, Arizona. This record shows that the workshop's name was known, if only narrowly, within the community. On Zurcher's own promotional page, dated to the fall of 2004, the address appears instead as Medford, in the state of Oregon. According to the same page, the maker was at that time in the process of applying to the optometry program at Pacific University and expected to move to Forest Grove near Portland. The discrepancy between the two addresses can be explained by the records belonging to successive periods; which was valid in which year, however, is not documented.

Production and Fate

There is no reliable account of Rivendell pipes' shape repertoire, the source of the briar used, or the stamping pattern. Neither a model series nor an annual production figure appears in the records. It might be assumed that a one-man, part-time operation would turn out a limited number of pipes, but there is no document to confirm this. In workshops of this scale it is common for every stage to pass through the same hands; for the general outline of the process, see the entry on how a pipe is made.

There is no publicly available trace of Zurcher continuing pipe making after 2004; the Pipedia entry itself was opened in 2009 with a call for current information. It is not known when the workshop closed, nor is there any record indicating it remains active. In this respect, Rivendell is placed in the same category as other hard-to-document American workshops such as Schoonmaker or Ozark Mountain Briars. That its name was recorded at all is owed largely to the maker registry compiled by Rex Poggenpohl.