Cherry and Pear Wood Pipes

Cherry and pear wood pipes were the most sensible solution at hand for European turners before tree heath came to dominate the pipe world. Clay broke, meerschaum was expensive; fruitwood logs from the garden or forest, by contrast, were both plentiful and soft enough to shape readily on a foot-powered lathe. Neither wood fully left the stage even after briar's rise.

The Woods of the Pre-Briar Era

Boxwood, beech, maple, and cherry were among the woods worked in France's Jura region from the 18th century onward. The region was already a center of turning: for workshops making rosary beads, buttons, spoons, and boxes, the pipe was simply one more product that could be made on the same lathe already at hand. It's said that turners around Saint-Claude were still working largely with these native woods in the mid-19th century. Once the transition described in the briar revolution and Saint-Claude was complete, fruitwoods fell to second place, since briar was both far more heat-resistant and far longer-lived.

The figure who institutionalized the cherrywood tradition was Eugène-Léon Ropp. Ropp took out a patent for a wild-cherry pipe in 1869 and set up a workshop the following year in Bussang, in the Vosges mountains. Production moved to Baume-les-Dames around 1893; the brand began being distributed in England and its colonies through A. Frankau & Co. just before the First World War. The firm gradually turned to briar as well, but cherrywood pipes remained Ropp's signature right up to its 1991 closure. The brand name was later revived under a different French maker, Cuty-Fort.