Demuth and Dunhill: Two Paths Crossing on Fifth Avenue

The Demuth—Dunhill connection is one of the unresolved questions in American pipe history: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, was there a genuine rivalry between New York's homegrown giant William Demuth & Company and London's Alfred Dunhill, or did the two firms' paths simply cross on the same avenue? The question was laid out in orderly fashion in 2023 by Ben Rapaport, a researcher working on tobacco objects (tobacciana). No correspondence or contract has been found directly linking the two companies; what exists is a string of events falling in the same years, and the similar fate of two great private collections.

The Two Firms

William Demuth & Company was referred to in the trade journals of its day as the world's largest pipe manufacturer. Its founder, William (Wilhelm C.) Demuth, emigrated from Germany; according to the record, after years as a pipe importer in New York he moved into his own production in 1862, eventually adding canes, zinc figures, and the cigar-store figures that stood outside tobacconists' shops to his catalog. The factory was in Queens, the showroom in Manhattan. The WDC letters set inside an inverted triangle became the firm's stamp; Wellington and Milano were its best-known briar lines. Management passed to the founder's brother, Leopold Demuth, in 1911.

Alfred Dunhill (1872-1959) took over his father's business in 1893, entered the pipe trade in 1904 by designing a windshield pipe for motorists, and opened his tobacconist's shop on Duke Street in 1907. The white dot on the mouthpiece came into use in 1912. Dunhill pipes first entered the American market through an importer's agency; the firm's own New York branch opened in the early 1920s, according to the record in 1921.

Fifth Avenue and the Schulte Circle

In those years Fifth Avenue was the center of the tobacco trade: Demuth's showroom, the offices of S. M. Frank and Kaywoodie, the American representations of several British brands, and Dunhill's new branch all stood at nearby addresses. The name that tied the two firms together on paper was the retailer David A. Schulte. According to the record, Schulte's group of companies held a controlling stake in Dunhill's New York store and also bought William Demuth & Company outright in 1927. About a decade later, S. M. Frank took over the Queens factory, bringing Demuth production under the same roof as Kaywoodie. Accounts hold that the WDC name dropped out of the records by 1972, with the Wellington line leaving production a few years after that.

Rivalry or Coincidence?

Rapaport's reading of a rivalry rests not on documents but on a sequence of publicity moves. In 1921 Dunhill presented President Warren G. Harding with four briar pipes in a leather case bearing a dedication; Demuth that same year sent a custom-made set to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of the Allied armies in the First World War. Harding's known fondness for the Milano model meant that in June 1923 the Mecca Temple group in New York presented the president with a seven-piece WDC Milano set; Demuth's own promotion of the same line as "Fifth Avenue's favorite" is, given the location of the Dunhill store, not considered coincidental by the researcher. At the 1924 Democratic Party convention the two firms again played to the same crowd: Demuth put a set of meerschaum pieces carved from presidential portraits on display at its factory, while Dunhill used the window of the tobacconist closest to the convention hall. Trade journals, for their part, had no qualms about placing the two brands side by side in a friendly photograph. In the 1929 customs tariff hearings, however, Dunhill's written submission to the Senate committee argued that imported pipes did not compete on the same terms as American production — openly denying any rivalry.

Two Collections, Two Dispersals

Both men collected antique pipes, and neither collection stayed together after its owner. Demuth donated a large part of his holdings to the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the gift, according to the record, is noted in the museum's annual reports from the turn of the century. When the company changed hands, the remainder stayed with Schulte; in 1940 the American Tobacco Company bought it and displayed it at its Richmond, Virginia factory, naming the collection after the firm's best-selling pipe tobacco. Accounts say that when the factory closed in 1957 the collection was transferred to the Valentine Museum in Richmond, then sold in 1991 to a tobacco museum in Vienna; when the museum closed in 2002 most of the pipes were dispersed at auction in the same city, with the remainder placed in storage. Austria Tabak, the museum's parent company, has been owned by Japan Tobacco International since 2007. Alfred Dunhill's pipes, tobacco jars, and books were, according to the record, likewise dispersed through two London auctions in 2004 and 2006. In the history of pipe collecting, these two dispersals show how far an institution's promise of preservation can hold up against a company changing hands.