Missouri Meerschaum

Missouri Meerschaum is the world's oldest and largest company making pipes from corncobs. Active since 1869 in the town of Washington in the U.S. state of Missouri, the brand has earned the town the title "Corncob Pipe Capital of the World."

Known for its lightness, the corncob pipe has been one of the most familiar symbols of American pipe culture for over a century and a half; Missouri Meerschaum is foremost among the enterprises that have carried this tradition into the present at an industrial scale.

Founding and Henry Tibbe

The company's origin traces to Henry Tibbe (1819-1897), a carpenter from Enschede, in the Netherlands. After a great fire in the city destroyed his workshop, Tibbe emigrated to America with his family in the early 1860s and opened a woodworking shop in Washington. As the story goes, a farmer who had carved himself a pipe from a corncob asked Tibbe to do the same on his lathe; the resulting pipes proved so popular that Tibbe soon devoted himself entirely to pipe production. According to records, the farmer who placed this first order was named John Schranke; while the company cites 1869 as its founding year, some researchers date the episode to 1872.

The real innovation that set Tibbe's pipes apart from others was a surface treatment he developed with a chemist friend: a plaster-based coating applied to the cob's outer surface, which smoothed the porous surface, filled out the shell, and made the pipe durable. The method was patented on July 6, 1878. Production moved to a larger, steam-powered building in 1877, and in 1883 Tibbe and his son Anton applied to register the trademark.