Large German Ulmer Pipe

Bowl is 8" high and stem is 9" long with silver cap and chain.

from Pipes & Tobacco magazine, Sept 2012:

The Ulmer's Reign

Ulm is that singular place where the Ulmer, locally identified as Ulmer Maserholzpfeife (mottled wood pipe), or Ulmer Kloben (lump or block), was designed and first fabricated. In that Spring 2001 P&T article, I reported that maserholz was the German word for “any type of veined, streaked, speckled, gnarled, burred, knotted, mottled or grained bird’s-eye wood” that was used to make a pipe. All other tobacco pipes produced in that town that exhibited any of these visible surface characteristics were simply identified as Ulmer Holzpfeifen (Ulmer wood pipes). Other wood pipes produced in Central Europe took on various configurations, some similar, others markedly different from the Ulmer, and were collectively called Ungarnpfeife, or Hungarian-style pipes; the three most popular configurations were the Debrecen (a city in Hungary), the Kalmasch (stylistically similar to a chibouk, shaped like a kettle, cauldron or inverted bell), and the Ragoczy (believed to have been named after a prince of Transylvania).

The Ulmer’s design has been dated to 1733 and attributed to a certain wood turner, Johann Jakob Glöckle (alternatively spelled Glöckler or Glöcklen):
Joh. Jakob Glöckle, a weaver of fine handcrafts (born March 6, 1702, died July 3, 1785), began around 1733 to carve trifles out of wood and, thereby, also prospered with tobacco-smoking pipe heads from veined wood. This became the origin in Ulm of the Glöckles-Head, and in foreign countries, the so-called Ulmer-Head.

Here is what has also been reported: “Das sehr gute Gewerbe wurde 1733 von dem Ulmer Weber Jak. Glöcklen gegründet, dessen Pfeifenköpfe sehr gesucht wurden” (Beschreibung des Oberamts Ulm, 1836, 95). (The very good trade was founded by Jak. Glöcklen of Ulm in 1733, whose pipe heads are very much sought after.) One hundred years later, Wolfgang Merkle in Gewerbe und Handel der Stadt Ulm (1988), called him “Der Begründer des Ulmer Pfeifenmacherhandwerks” (literally, the Originator of Ulm Pipemaker Handcrafts). Or, as another historian put it:
… [I]n 1733, Johann Jakob Glöckle had created an especially beautiful pipe, the Ulmer veined wood pipe, that quickly circulated beyond the borders of Ulm. The pipe head was fabricated out of root wood, selected trees and shrubs, such as maple and walnut.

Greater fame, however, was garnered by another carver, Johann Jakob Gmünder, who advertised in the local press as a “Tabaks-Pfeiffen-Köpfe-Fabrikant in Ulm.”

The Ulmer was later manufactured in at least one other German town, Schwäbisch-Gmünd, but, wherever produced, this distinctive configuration would continue to be attributed to Ulm and to Glöckle. The scope of production is unknown, because there was no pipemaker’s guild and, factually, the earliest Ulm wood turners carved pipes when they needed to supplement their income.

By 1789, about 20 Ulmer pipemakers were actively engaged in that city; the number increased to around 45 makers between 1797 and 1812. Starting with Glöckle’s prototype and for the next 120 years or so, the Ulmer was extremely popular among pipe smokers, but then the Ulmer was supplanted at about the middle of the 19th century by the increasingly popular porcelain pipe, the surge in meerschaum pipe production and the acceptance of a new innovation, the cigar, as an alternative mode of smoking. According to archival information, in 1870, only two Ulmer pipe smiths were active in Germany.