If you are ever, under any excuse, in Missouri for a couple of days you have to visit the Missouri Meerschaum factory and museum in Washington, Missouri.
Plan a full day just to see the museum and the sights around Washington, which is just across the river from Heerman, the center of Missouri’s wine industry.
Missouri Meerschaum got a 17 year head start on it’s competition by patenting the plastered and lathe turned cob and the wooden part on the shank that serves to shield the bottom of the bowl from burnout.
But in 1895 it was Katy bar the door for anyone to take a cob and make a really good cob pipe, much better than can be made at home.
About 1900 it was hard to count all the cob pipe makers in Washington Missouri, as many as twenty at one time.
But in 1912 the City of Boonville raised a fund to induce the merged Phoenix and American cob pipe makers in Washington to move up the river. Phoenix American built the largest cob pipe factory in the world and made pipes until Missouri Meerschaum bought the company in 1954 and moved production back to Washington.
Phoenix American was likely the most serious competitor to Missouri Meerschaum. As Avis used to advertise, Number Two Tries Harder.
It’s hard to photograph but Phoenix American used a second growth Arkansas hickory (best axe handle grade) shank that had two machine operations to improve it over the identical dowel MM used.
The P-A shank is tapered, instead of round, which mates to a tapered hole in the cob. A better fit.
And there was a U cut in the dowel to make a better protector of the bottom of the bowl. On a MM it’s cut at angle, no coverage on the far side.
But the crowning glory was the magnificent stainless steel insert in the imitation amber stems.
All in all they look about like a MM Legend does today. Note the newer pipes had smaller kernels due to MM’s exclusive hybrid cob pipe corn developed in the late forties.
P-A —- Irvin S Cob—-Legend—-Freehand
Plan a full day just to see the museum and the sights around Washington, which is just across the river from Heerman, the center of Missouri’s wine industry.
Missouri Meerschaum got a 17 year head start on it’s competition by patenting the plastered and lathe turned cob and the wooden part on the shank that serves to shield the bottom of the bowl from burnout.
But in 1895 it was Katy bar the door for anyone to take a cob and make a really good cob pipe, much better than can be made at home.
About 1900 it was hard to count all the cob pipe makers in Washington Missouri, as many as twenty at one time.
But in 1912 the City of Boonville raised a fund to induce the merged Phoenix and American cob pipe makers in Washington to move up the river. Phoenix American built the largest cob pipe factory in the world and made pipes until Missouri Meerschaum bought the company in 1954 and moved production back to Washington.
Phoenix American was likely the most serious competitor to Missouri Meerschaum. As Avis used to advertise, Number Two Tries Harder.
It’s hard to photograph but Phoenix American used a second growth Arkansas hickory (best axe handle grade) shank that had two machine operations to improve it over the identical dowel MM used.
The P-A shank is tapered, instead of round, which mates to a tapered hole in the cob. A better fit.
And there was a U cut in the dowel to make a better protector of the bottom of the bowl. On a MM it’s cut at angle, no coverage on the far side.
But the crowning glory was the magnificent stainless steel insert in the imitation amber stems.
All in all they look about like a MM Legend does today. Note the newer pipes had smaller kernels due to MM’s exclusive hybrid cob pipe corn developed in the late forties.
P-A —- Irvin S Cob—-Legend—-Freehand
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