Christie Pipes

Christie Pipes is the name of the American pipes Eric C. Christie makes one by one in the town of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. The brand rests not on a series-production factory but on the workshop behind a family shop: Christie both makes pipes carrying his own name and takes on repair work for other workshops and shops. He made his name chiefly through this second line of work, carrying the reputation earned in the repair shop over to his own pipes.

The Apprenticeship Years

Christie's mentor was Richard C. Johnson, a senior figure in American pipe-making. Records indicate Johnson began making pipes in 1939 at Weber Pipe Co., founded by Carl Weber in Jersey City, New Jersey, and later settled in rural Pennsylvania, opening his own shop, Johnson's Pipe Shop, in Carlisle in the 1960s. How long Christie spent at this workshop is inconsistent across sources: Pipedia says three years in the early 1980s, while the maker's own website says four years in the mid-1980s. Where the two accounts agree is that the training took the form of an almost unbroken bench schedule, six days a week.

After his apprenticeship, Christie's day job kept him away from pipe-making for a while; he nonetheless continued taking special orders and repairs for his father's pipe and tobacco shop in Waynesboro. Since his output during these years stayed confined to a single bench and a single storefront, pipes carrying his signature did not travel far beyond a narrow circle of customers. The founder's name appears in sources sometimes as Eric C., sometimes as Eric E. Christie.