In presidential races of yore — before the advent of T-shirts, hats, signs and bumper stickers — voters indicated their preferences through the pipes they smoked. They puffed tobacco between their favorite presidential wannabes’ ears.
“This is how you let people know who you supported and how you were voting,” said Meagan Huff, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site curator. “You were advertising something about yourself.”
The fort’s archaeology collection features several “president pipes” and thousands of pipe fragments that date to the 1840s and 1850s. The most intact pieces are pipe bowls featuring the likenesses of U.S. Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.
Those presidential visages are displayed prominently in a glass case in the free-admission visitor center at 1501 E. Evergreen Blvd., yet they’re still diminutive enough to miss unless you know what you’re looking for.
Like their pipe likenesses, Taylor and Fillmore’s reputations are diminutive indeed. Both are near the bottom in a 2023 ranking of “presidential greatness” by scholars and members of the American Political Science Association: Out of 46 presidents, Taylor ranked No. 38 and Fillmore No. 39. (The top three were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and George Washington. Joe Biden ranked 15th. Donald Trump ranked last.)
Why such undistinguished presidencies? Because Taylor and Fillmore failed to confront and settle the matter of slavery.
Taylor was a member of the Whig party and a celebrated U.S. Army general who was elected 12th president in November 1848 without political experience or strong political views other than to preserve a nation fracturing over slavery. Taylor, who sought compromise above all else, took office in March 1849. He died suddenly of stomach disease in July 1850 after serving as president for a mere 15 months.
That’s when Fillmore, his vice president, became the 13th U.S. president. Fillmore disliked slavery but didn’t take action to end it, instead supporting the complex Compromise of 1850, which banned slavery in some states and territories while preserving the possibility in vast swaths of the future nation. Fillmore tried for reelection in 1853 but didn’t even win his party’s primary.
The next president was Franklin Pierce, who further facilitated the growth of slavery in the West, and who also failed to be chosen by his own party for a second term. Pierce’s “greatness” was recently ranked a dismal No. 42. After Pierce came James Buchanan in 1857 (ranked No. 44) and then Abraham Lincoln in 1861, at which point the Southern states started seceding and the Civil War began.
“They say American history is not boring. It’s never boring,” Huff said. “There’s always so much happening.”
Parties with pipes
Presidential pipes were typically stub-type, meaning they had a short, thick, removable stem. Most were manufactured in Germany. Affordable German pipes were big business at the fort until imports dropped off after the Civil War, according to a historical booklet on the topic by researcher Heidi Pierson. (By the 1870s, Pierson writes, smokers were opting for different smoking materials and technologies, including cigars.)
Nearly a century later, in the 1940s and 1950s, archaeologists started unearthing pipe fragments — and a precious few whole pipes — in telltale clusters in and around today’s fort. These clusters help us understand exactly where and when people congregated, as well as where they discarded broken remains, Huff said.
One of these repositories was where today’s Vancouver Land Bridge crosses state Highway 14, Huff said. It was the site of a small pond that came to be used as a garbage dump by those living in and around the fort. The site has yielded concentrated and “super interesting” results for archaeologists, she said.
The many fragments found outside what was called the Sale Shop (the fort’s general store) are evidence of people (OK, men) enjoying a puff while queueing up to get inside and buy supplies, according to Pierson’s publication. Chief Factor John McLoughlin reportedly did not smoke or chew tobacco. But as the fort’s commanding officer, he let subordinates take several smoking breaks per day, given the evidence found in the yard outside his house, Pierson writes.
In the far corners of that yard, archaeologists have also found pipe fragments commingled with bottle fragments, suggesting that those slightly obscure spots provided “a convivial meeting place for gentlemen of the Fort,” Pierson writes.
In other words, it sounds like some rascals took to the remotest edges of the yard to drink while they smoked.
“That’s what makes these pipes so interesting,” Huff said. “You can learn a lot about people through these patterns.”
Eyewitnesses of fort life described — some fondly, others disgustedly — how men’s social gatherings produced such thick, noxious clouds of tobacco smoke that some fled for fresh air, Pierson writes.
“These artifacts give modern-day archaeologists and historians an idea of what life might have been like in the early days of the military post,” she writes. “They tell us something about what was on the minds of Vancouver’s earliest American residents.”
