463 - Grimm & Triepel Nordhausen Chewing Tobacco Jar, Westerwald Stoneware, Eckhardt & Engler, 1920s

Grimm & Triepel Nordhausen Chewing Tobacco Jar, Westerwald Stoneware, Eckhardt & Engler, 1920s Stoneware, salt-glazed, grey and cobalt blue glaze. Squat cylindrical storage jar with a resting lid and cone-shaped knob, at the sides two applied moulded cone handles. The wall with the blue inscription Grimm & Triepel in large sans-serif lettering, beneath it Kautabak, above and below encircling bands of beading and dots. On the lid the encircling inscription Echt Nordhäuser Kautabak executed in relief between encircling grooves. In the base the oval impressed mark Eckhardt & Engler Höhr. Good condition commensurate with age. H. 17 cm, diam. 17 cm. 360-degree photo on our website. Theodor Grimm founded his tobacco factory in Nordhausen in June 1849; in 1858 Adolf Triepel joined as co-owner, and in 1881 the business passed to Otto Kruse. Before the Second World War the house employed up to eighteen hundred people and, with around sixty-five million packets a year, was the largest chewing tobacco factory in Europe; after expropriation and the Kruse family's new start in Hesse, production ended in December 2016, while the brand is carried on to this day. Besides its brandy, Nordhausen was known above all for its chewing tobacco, which miners and workers chewed because open flames were forbidden underground. Peter Eckhardt and Ernst Johann Engler first ran a trading house in Höhr from 1898; in 1914 they acquired a small works with a kiln, but their own production only started with the purchase of the moulds of the insolvent house of Roßkopf & Gerz in 1918. Their impressed mark therefore indicates a date after 1918; the firm existed until 1971.