American Pipe Manufacturers Compiled from Library of Congress Directories

The listing of American pipe manufacturers drawn from Library of Congress directories is an archival survey completed in 1991 by clay-pipe researcher S. Paul Jung Jr. The resulting list gives, together, the names of firms that made or sold pipes in the United States, the cities where they were located, and the years in which they were recorded; the period it covers runs roughly from 1860 to 1930.

The Structure of the Database

The work is built on two layers. The upper layer is an alphabetical index of all manufacturers and distributors falling within the date range, and is meant for quick lookup. The lower layer opens each record individually, showing which directory volume that particular record came from. Because a firm's address could change over the years, it is this second layer that must be consulted for any serious dating question. A key to the abbreviations found in the records is given in a separate section. The text's current form is four separate PDFs, sorted by firm name and by city-state.

The Nature of a Directory Record

Jung did not confine himself to a single type of publication; he surveyed street directories, local and regional business directories, and state-scale trade yearbooks together. The internal division of these directories determines how the data should be read. The white-pages section is a kind of address register and allows a firm to be tracked year to year. Appearing in the trade section or the "yellow pages," however, was a paid advertising matter; small workshops rarely appear there, and often only once. That single appearance generally corresponds to the year the firm began operating.

The data's limits stem from this same structure. The Library of Congress does not hold a complete set of every directory printed in the country; some volumes have been lost over time. Because of the lead time needed to prepare a directory for print, the records run roughly a year behind the actual situation. Directories also often do not specify what material a pipe was made from; for this reason, entries under the heading of clay pipe have been tracked in detail in the white pages, while briar and meerschaum makers have not been surveyed to the same depth. According to the source, during the years the survey was conducted the library, despite operating a closed-stack system, allowed researchers into the stacks; this access is said to have later been withdrawn following theft of material from the stacks, though this detail has not been independently confirmed.

Its Place in Research History

The listing builds no narrative; it presents raw record. That is exactly where its value lies: a researcher trying to date a stamp or a fragment recovered from a dig can find, alongside well-known names such as the William Demuth Company, the trace of small manufactories that appear in no other source at all. Among Jung's other closely related works are a two-volume 1987 compilation gathering the pipe patents, designs, and trademarks issued by the US Patent Office between 1858 and 1899, and a monograph on the three-generation clay-pipe business of the Pollock family of Manchester. For the place of patent records in dating, see the entry on pipe patents; for a similar effort compiling forgotten manufacturers, see forgotten producers of the briar trade.