Clay Pipes and its history

Clay pipes first appear in Europe and in the archaeological record of early European colonies in the Americas during the 16th century. Tobacco was an especially common commodity in England, France, Holland and Spain during the early colonial period.

A wide variety of styles have been tried, but the ones that have endured are mostly essentially the same: a longish stem, usually straight or very slightly curved, ending in a flared, usually conical bowl. Clay pipes are normally made in one piece, however there was a little experimentation in a few regions (notably Ireland and South Africa) with composite pipes combining clay bowls with stems made from other materials, such as horn. As these composite pipes turn up quite late (19th century and early 20th) and follow patterns that are common in briar pipes, it seems likely that these were attempts by pipe smokers of limited resources to reproduce the briar pipes they liked in a material they could afford.

At first, all clay pipes were hand made by craftsmen using press moulds and soft clay. In the 18th century, as the price of tobacco reached levels that made it more accessible to the common man, production started to shift toward slip casting in plaster moulds. Press casting continued, however, to be the process of choice for those who wanted a quality pipe.

Clay pipes were smoked regularly by people as diverse as sailors, explorers in the New World, and by the nobility in the Old World, and are a reasonably common find in archaeological sites that date later than 1550.

The main reason that clay pipes have been more or less abandoned at present is the sheer affordability of briar during the first part of the 20th century, and the association of the cheap slip-cast pipes with poverty. In later decades, good briar started to become a little more difficult to find, but the clay pipe making industry had already more or less died out, and at the present time, despite their advantages, clay pipes are a novelty rather than the norm.