Carroll of Carrolton

SPECIAL BULLETIN Lá na nAithreacha Sona Duit! Happy Father’s Day! I invite you this week to unplug from your devices, unwind from your workday cares, light your favorite Pete and join me in Peterson’s celebration of America’s Semiquincentennial on July 4th. According to Andy Wike,  the sixth and last installment of the Carroll of Carrollton Commemorative will “drop Wednesday, June 24 at 6:00 p.m. Eastern on Smokingpipes.” While I never discuss politics or religion here on the blog (!), let me make exception this morning to praise—with the qualifications due in respecting all human beings of other times—Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland. In our era of political and economic tyranny, of Autocracy, Inc. Big Pharma, Big Ag and Crapitalism (I just found out that was a word, incidentally), Carroll was something unique in American history—he was the only Irish Roman Catholic among the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence. It's true he was a slave-holder who wrestled unsuccessfully with his conscience all his life, himself a slave to his own wealth. And yes, he was fabulously wealthy. And yes, he was highly educated. And despite everything, a man of deep sensibilities and strong convictions.  Among those of his day, to be Irish in a population of European Americans was very near to anathema in itself.  To be Catholic? Like black Americans, Catholics were almost universally disenfranchised. Forbidden from voting. Prohibited from holding political office. And—Catholic, a faith which was only gradually tolerated in America.  So ya, definitely an outsider, something we routinely say we applaud but in fact usually do so in the hidden agenda of conformity. But one of the things a Thinking Man ponders while smoking a Carroll of Carrollton pipe has to be the tragedy and complexity of the enterprise of American democracy--of its near-failure at the outset, at its continual crises throughout its history, at the perils it faces today.  So, as the poet says, "Think--and smoake Tobacco." The Carroll of Carrollton was a series imagineered by Josh Burgess, Laudisi's VP of Manufacturing, who not-so-incidentally holds a PhD in colonial American history from the University of South Carolina (see PPN#184). The marketing idea was to draw a parallel between the small, long-stemmed tavern pipes of the colonial era, like those made for decades by the old Williamsburg Pottery before that fabled company went into decline. Closer to home, for us and for K&P, however, is the encyclopedic sensibility that has informed the shape chart since the beginning—or at least, since the 1906 catalog. In the 1906 catalog we find the first generation of today’s Carroll of Carrollton commemorative--the Reading Pipes--which like today’s pipe were produced using small bowls from elsewhere in the production and straight P-Lip stems (which would have made them amazing smoking devices). The medium and long Reading Pipes, as you can see, were pretty much exactly the length of the Carrollton pipes—i.e., demi-churchwardens. At the cease of hostilities in 1945, K&P launched the second iteration of its long-stems, the Specialty Churchwarden (see…