Smoking in the Privy

When he was fifteen years old, Douglas Diez would spend afternoons taking his grandmother’s car out to go bottle digging. After school, he could be found hip deep in area swamps, in old wells, and most often, in the buried outhouses of New Orleans past.

It all began with a challenge from his grandmother, who promised him use of the car and five dollars each time he went digging for antique bottles. It didn’t take long for Diez to teach himself the archaeological technique of probing—similar to the practice used by gas line companies —to find privies, the ultimate source of bottles. Families in the 1800s would routinely toss unwanted household items in their privy, ; today amateur and professional archaeologists might find anything in them from crockery and shoes to turtle and oyster shells, combs, eyeglasses, and of course, bottles.

During the rise of modern plumbing, privies were filled in with soil, effectively burying their contents. Infill dirt does not compact to the degree of untouched soil, so bottle diggers—searching on residential lots in small towns as well as urban neighborhoods—can use long probes to find “disturbed soil” in the subsurface. To locate a privy or well, Diez would insert his probe into the ground to see how deep it would go before meeting resistance; if it only went a couple of feet before stopping, the soil was likely undisturbed, and there was no privy in that spot. Alternatively, when he would insert the probe, and it sank all the way up to the handle, he’d get out a shovel and start digging.

One particular Friday afternoon, Diez took off after school and drove from his home in Gonzales to New Orleans, planning to scout out a privy or two. He landed on the corner of Magazine Street and Howard Avenue (now Andrew Higgins) and stopped at the site of a recent demolition. Out came the probe, and Diez got to work.

“I found disturbances and started hitting bricks and granite and glass everywhere all in a little circle. I realized that I had found either an old outhouse or I’d found an old well,” he said. “I drove back home around six, seven o’clock. I put out my hard hat, work boots, my ropes, my buckets, all my tools, and the next morning at 4 am, I’m back at the corner of Magazine, alone, and I start digging.” 

Diez had found an old brick-lined well about five feet in diameter. By daylight, he was three feet down in the well and already finding bottles. He kept digging, and by two that afternoon, he was fourteen feet down, his rope tied to the bumper of his car. When he hit the bottom, he found something he had never encountered on previous archaeological forays: a clay tobacco pipe. 

The bowl of the pipe was carved to resemble the head of a man, and the words “President Fillmore” were stamped on its stem. Diez went home and started researching his pipe, turning to books, newsletters, and the experiences of other diggers. He learned that nineteenth century political candidates would frequently distribute smoking pipes as a means of self-promotion, similar to the way they use campaign buttons today. 

"Native Americans were the first to smoke tobacco in pipes. Finding that pipe on the ancestral lands of the Houma gave me a direct connection to history." —Douglas Diez 

“It was so clever because everybody smoked a pipe,” said Diez. “Even women smoked them, albeit smaller, daintier pipes.”

Diez’s initial curiosity turned him into a lifelong collector of smoking pipes, though he has never been a smoker. Fifty years after finding his first pipe, Diez now owns a world-class, Smithsonian-recognized collection of historical tobacco pipes, including the entire series of presidential clay pipes, from George Washington all the way to Theodore Roosevelt, who the last president to use the method as cigarettes gained popularity in the early twentieth century.

“I became an amateur archeologist,” he said. “I dug for weeks in Philadelphia when they built the Interstate, I dug in Baltimore when they built the Inner Harbor, and I dug all throughout the state of New York. I’ve dug all over England, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, up and down the River Road—it’s where all the houses were in the late eighteenth century.” 

During college, Diez would spend months in England and France during the summers, learning everything he could from pipe makers and collectors. He kept digging until he was about thirty when his work as a real estate agent began to require more of his time. But his passion—which he confesses is a bit of an obsession—has never waned. Today instead of digging for them, he buys pipes and collections from other devotees.

Unlike many other collectors, though, Diez is loath to part with any of the pipes he has acquired. He estimates that in fifty years of collecting pipes, he has only ever sold pipes when he has a duplicate. “I am a collector, not a trader,” he explained. 

Over time, storing the pipes has become a challenge for Diez. The walls of his home office were once lined floor to ceiling with glass fronted cabinets for displaying a tiny fraction of the five thousand pipes he estimates he owns. So, when Houmas House and founder of the Great River Road Museum Kevin Kelly asked him if he would be interested in donating the collection to the museum, Diez quickly agreed. 

“The Smithsonian had talked to me about donating my collection to them, but I have decided to donate it instead to the Great River Road Museum here in Louisiana,” he said. “Kevin Kelly has promised to display all the pipes, whereas the Smithsonian would display only a fraction of the collection at a time; the remainder would be kept in storage.”

For all the glamorous, humorous, bawdy, and elegant pipes in the collection, Diez said there is one that is particularly special to him. The pipe has a bowl shaped like the head of a Native American, which he found near the grounds of Houmas House, the ancestral lands of the Houma nation. 

[Read this: "On Collecting—Tales of humans and their objects]

“Native Americans were the first to smoke tobacco in pipes,” Diez said, explaining that European settlers in the Americas started making clay pipes in the likeness of the Indigenous people there, and they were often used to trade with the Native Americans in exchange for fur. “Finding that pipe on the ancestral lands of the Houma gave me a direct connection to history,” he said. 

The Pipes: A Brief History

The five thousand (give or take) pipes in Diez’s collection are made of just four materials: clay, wood, porcelain, and meerschaum. 

Clay Pipes

White clay pipes were made in England and France beginning in roughly 1600 after tobacco was introduced from Virginia in the new world.

“The arrival of tobacco gave rise to whole new industry,” Diez said. “Clay pipes were made all over England and France. The bowls were small at first because tobacco was so expensive. But then when there were more growers and it became plentiful, the bowls of pipes grew larger. At that point, pipe smoking was no longer for the wealthy only, but for the common man as well.”

The fine grain of the clay that was harvested made it possible to make pipes with exquisite detail. Every pipe started with a small piece of clay that was kneaded to get the bubbles out, then rolled out by hand. A long pin was inserted in one end to create the pipe stem, and at the other end, a nub of clay was left that would become the bowl. The rope of clay was laid into a cast iron mold, then the mold was clamped in a vise to ensure that the clay filled every nook and cranny. The last step was firing the clay at 1000 degrees Farenheit for two days.

No pipe maker did it better than Maison Gambier in France and Charles Crop in England. 

Beginning in 1780 and continuing into the 1920s, Jean Gambier’s company made two billion clay pipes, as many as 300,000 pipes per day, representing figures such as Queen Victoria, Rembrandt, and Niccolò Paganini, as well as Bacchus and Cupid, plus horses, monkeys, and more. Gambier’s best known—and most copied—pipe was the “Jacob Pipe,” introduced in 1834. When Gambier shut down in 1928, there were 1260 molds included in the liquidation, eleven of them variations of the Jacob pipe. Diez said that about thirty percent of his clay pipes were made by Gambier.

“Crop in England tried to compete with Gambier, but they didn’t quite make it,” Diez observed.

[A Cracker Jack Collection: Delighting children—and one River Ridge collector—since at least 1912]

“American clay pipes—made of brown or red clay from the Ohio River region, were not as refined as the European ones, but they were nonetheless wildly popular. Many were made in the image of Native Americans, others depicted the heads of political figures, such as Diez’s very first President Fillmore pipe. Back in the 1800s, pipes were so plentiful and inexpensive they would be given away with the purchase of matches—someone one would smoke a pipe once or twice and throw it away.”    

Wooden Pipes

Use of wooden pipes began as early as the sixteenth century in Europe, and in the eighteenth century in the United States. There are hundreds in Diez’s inventory, many made of briarwood. Some of the carved wood pipes are considered folk art, carved by untrained artists into grotesque faces with exaggerated features. One of them depicts the head of a pirate; Diez believes it might have been a gift from Andrew Jackson to Jean Lafitte, celebrating the great victory of the Battle of New Orleans. 

Porcelain Pipes and Meerschaum

Porcelain pipes from Germany, on the other hand, required trained artists to paint the women, forest scenes, horses, cherubs, and more on the body of the pipe. These pipes are colorful, with bright images painted on a white background, then glazed. 

The artists who carved meerschaum (a type of white, porous sedimentary rock made of the shells of many small microorganisms) were expert sculptors who carved horses, women’s heads, Arabian princes, horses, and erotica out of the material, which is mined today only in Turkey. Perhaps it’s the Turkish origin of the meerschaum that has resulted in the now iconic turbaned and bearded head seen so often on contemporary meerschaum pipes.