William Demuth Company (WDC)

William Demuth Company is a firm founded in New York in the second half of the nineteenth century that, within a generation, grew into one of America's most recognized pipe houses. The letters WDC, set inside an inverted equilateral triangle, appeared for decades on both carved meerschaum and mass-produced briar pipes, becoming a mark better known than the brand name itself.

Founder and the Company's Origins

Wilhelm C. Demuth, the man who gave the company its name, was born in Germany in 1835 and, according to records, emigrated to America alone at sixteen. After years of working for wages in New York's tobacco trade, he opened his own business in 1862 and remained at its head until his death in 1911. The product list of the founding years resembles a carving business more than today's pipe brands: alongside pipes, the same workshops produced smoker's accessories, canes, and life-size carved figures set outside cigar shop doors.

Meerschaum and the Presidents Series

The firm's most talked-about work today lies in meerschaum carving. Foremost among these is the figurative series of portraits of U.S. presidents. The series, running from John Adams to Herbert Hoover, comprises twenty-eight portrait pipes plus a bust of Washington; adding a pipe carrying the face of each newly elected president to the series long remained the firm's custom, a practice that ended with Hoover.

Accounts trace the series's origin to an acquaintance formed with President James A. Garfield, known to be a meerschaum enthusiast: at his 1881 inauguration, Garfield was presented two pipes, one bearing his own face and one his wife's. The place of such gifts in American politics is further discussed in the pipes presented to American presidents entry. Another example of the same carving tradition is the meerschaum composition titled "Columbus Landing in America," which took two years to complete and exceeds eighty centimeters in length; the piece was shown at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Briar Lines and the Factory

As the twentieth century began, the emphasis shifted from hand carving to series production, and from meerschaum to briar. The center of this transformation was the large factory built in 1895 in Queens's Richmond Hill neighborhood, which operated for decades; thanks to this plant, WDC is counted among the country's largest pipe producers. Ferdinand Feuerbach, who joined the firm in 1897 and rose to production manager in 1903, played a decisive role in shaping the Royal Demuth and Milano Hesson Guard lines. The Hesson name comes from William Wallace Hesson, who held two patents for inventions related to the pipe's internal mechanism. Feuerbach left the firm in 1919 and took charge of his old friend Sam Frank's factory in the Bronx. The firm's Fifth Avenue proximity to, and intersection with, its English rival in these years is the subject of the Demuth and Dunhill connection entry.

The S. M. Frank Era and Closing

The paths of the two firms crossed in 1937 for an unexpected reason: New York's city government decided to condemn part of the land on which Frank's Bronx factory stood, for a street-widening project. Searching for a new production site, Frank began negotiations for the Richmond Hill plant; the resulting agreement turned the Demuth company into a subsidiary of S. M. Frank & Co., and the production of the two brands was gathered under a single roof.

Demuth pipes continued to be made at this factory through the last day of 1972; the company was formally dissolved through liquidation the same year. The brand was not wiped out entirely: its best-selling model, Wellington, continued to appear in the S. M. Frank catalogue until 1976, and records indicate it was briefly reintroduced in the mid-1980s. The factory building itself was not torn down; in later years it was repurposed as housing, remaining part of the neighborhood's fabric.