William H. Hendrikx

William H. Hendrikx is a maker who worked in New York State during the interwar period, whose name today is traced largely through a pipe patent registered in 1934. He held two entirely different positions in his career: he was first a manager running briar pipe factories in the College Point section of New York, then set up his own bench in a small settlement in the Hudson Valley and made pipes alone.

This dual history shows how permeable the line between factory production and handmade work was in America of that era, a point also discussed in the artisan pipe and factory pipe entry.

A Manager in the Factory Years

Hendrikx's first professional identity in the United States was not as a maker but as a manager. He is said to have headed the A. Frankau & Co. factory in College Point in 1923; this plant is stated to have been the American production arm of the English BBB brand. In later years he is also associated with managing the Hesson factory, located in the same Long Island neighborhood; this period of management is said to have lasted about twenty years.

Information about the maker's life before coming to America rests only on accounts in pipe literature and is not supported by any independent record. According to these accounts he was born around 1882 in Amsterdam, the son of a language teacher; though he learned several languages as a child, he sought his own path in handcraft and entered the trade working part-time in a Dutch pipe factory. The same sources state he emigrated to Quebec, Canada, around 1906, and had settled on Long Island by 1915.