A Site Visit to the Pamplin Pipe Factory Preserve with Kelley Berliner

Hey Kelly Berliner here with the Archaeological Conservancy and today we are at the Pamplin Pipe Factory. So located in central Virginia this preserve contains the remains of a historic pipe factory and what we'll do is we'll post a little bit of information in the description below. There are a lot of links where you can learn more about this site but give you a little bit of an idea of the resource that is protected here. So this part of Virginia has a type of clay that works really really well for pipe making. It's a really rich red in color and quite quite sticky I would say so it works well for creating vessels and so there was a cottage industry that formed here early on probably by the 1700s when European settlers were moving into the region and this was often women who would make these pipes in their kitchens in their homes leave them outside to dry and would sell them to the general store. So in the late 1870s a company called E.H. Merrill based out of Akron, Ohio came into the Pamplin area and founded the Pamplin Pipe Factory on this site. So they employed a number of workers who used pedal powered machines to form clay pipes and this greatly increased the amount of production that could be done. By 1935 the company would claim that they were making over 1 million pipes a month which is pretty substantial. Many of them would have been fired in a kiln on the site. The kiln that's located here this is a reconstruction but it was actually right around 1952 that the company went out of business and this is probably due to a combination of factors but primarily the rise of cigarettes which put pipe smoking a bit out of fashion. The company did try to find a niche market by making novelty pipes such as one shaped like a tomahawk and another one shaped like Robert E. Lee as well as various other pipes of interest but it wasn't enough to keep the business afloat. Following bankruptcy the site was used for a number of other businesses including a sawmill until it was acquired by the Archaeological Conservancy for permanent preservation. Much of the site remains preserved including areas likely where workers were living and so there's a lot of potential for researching the rise of this industry. At one point Pamplin was shipping pipes all over the United States. They've been found in many different contexts and so a really important opportunity to understand more about early industry in this country and the archaeology of early industry. Prior to the conservancy's ownership it was owned by a gentleman named Ray Dickerson also known as Ray the Pipe Man Dickerson and he operated a small museum inside the factory here where he would make replica pipes and he and his wife recognized the importance of this site and ensured that it was sold to the conservancy so this site of industrial archaeology would be preserved in perpetuity. The conservancy continues to work closely with the town of Pamplin to make sure that the property is mowed and protected. It is locked up since it is not open to public access but we're out here today. I'm going to meet with some folks from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and we're going to go out and just do a little trimming of the brush that have grown up in the hill and walk around and see if there's anything else that needs attention.