INTRODUCTION
This is presented as an aid in the identification of clay pipes from the general area of Pamplin, Virginia, that might appear in archaeological and historic sites. Interest in these pipes has been stimulated by their being reported as found in various sites in the western United States.
The circumstances under which this information has been gathered and the fact that it has been a number of years since clay pipes were made here, either as a home industry or commercially by the Pamplin Smoking Pipe and Manufacturing Company, leave much to be desired. On the other hand, in our work we have inspected a total of 4,451 Pamplin pipes; of this number 39% were from the factory grounds, and 61% were from the Thornton Store Site and represented the home industry, so we feel that the 39 forms presented represent at least a majority of the pipe forms made at Pamplin.
This is not to say that a similar form could not have been made elsewhere; however the style, the generally heavier and thicker character of the piece, and the finish, or lack of it, as well as the usual deep red color of the Virginia clay, would seem to make these pipes distinctive.
Under the conditions in which these pipes were retrieved it is obvious that the numbers of the different forms located give little indication of the relative numbers of the different styles that were manufactured, the popularity of the various styles, or the relative time of their manufacture.
Nearly all of the pipes examined were retrieved by excavation, by people who simply happened to become interested; this is equally true whether the pipes had been made by the factory and excavated out of fill on the old factory grounds, or whether they were made at the homes and excavated from the basement of the old Thornton Store, which through the years had taken them in trade for merchandise.
In some cases among the pipes examined there were not more than one, or a few, examples of a certain form. In other cases there were hundreds. Among the examples available to us there was generally little variation in size within the same form. We have illustrated the largest and the smallest, since this also gives an opportunity to note minor variations that may exist between different molds for the same pipe form. However, a rather wide variation in size was present in that shown as ([Plate 13] A), the “Original” Powhatan, where a total of 12 gradations from largest to smallest were found.
The predominant color of the pipes is dark red. A lighter color is infrequently present, running from almost yellow, to salmon, to light brown. The very dark, almost black coloration of some is said to come either from minerals present in the soil of this area, to which the pipes presented here had been subjected since nearly all had been many years underground, or from actual fire that had fallen into the saggers of the Company kiln, or the iron pots in which the pipes had been fired in the home industry.
During the last years of factory operation “some white clay from either West Virginia or Kentucky was shipped in by railroad”. This resulted in pipes of a lighter color, at times light grey to white. Apparently no pipes made from this particular clay were seen by us, except possibly those illustrated in [Plate 23] AJ.