McClelland Tobacco Company

McClelland Tobacco Company was a pipe tobacco manufacturer operating in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1977 to 2018. Regarded as the world's reference brand in matured Virginia, the company became one of the most talked-about names in American pipe culture, thanks to its whale emblem and the distinctive tangy smell of its tins.

Founding and Rise

The brand's origin traces to Carl R. Ehwa Jr. joining Kansas City's well-known tobacconist Fred Diebel in 1969. There Ehwa developed blends for the shop and was put in charge of a small manufactory attached to it; he gathered the knowledge from these years into a book, The Book of Pipes and Tobaccos, published by Random House/Ridge Press in 1974. The company was founded in 1977 by Ehwa, his wife Mary, and Ehwa's childhood friend Bob Berish Jr. (given as Benish in some sources). Production began in the basement of the home of Ehwa's grandfather, Dr. W.C. McClelland, the man the company was named after; Dr. McClelland, who died at 87, took part in the preparations but never saw the first sale. The company launched with ten blends, five Oriental mixtures and five matured Virginias.

When Berish left in 1980, Mike McNiel, who had previously worked with Ehwa at the Diebel manufactory, joined the staff. In 1982, at thirty-six, Ehwa suffered a brain aneurysm and was unable to return to run the company; the business stayed afloat through the shared efforts of a small staff that included sales manager Marv Novy. Mary and Mike McNiel, who ran the company together, married in 1993. When the factory eventually spread through the whole of the McClelland house, an insurance company warning prompted a move in 1985: the new address was a hundred-year-old building in Kansas City's arts district, whose upper floor, it was later learned, had been used as a speakeasy in the 1920s.