Since August, Denmark’s Montergarden Museum, part of Odense’s City Museum complex, has featured an exhibit that honors the city’s historic ties with tobacco and commemorates one of its historic leading tobacco companies, Erik Stokkebye A/S.
The Montergarden Museum specializes in teaching visitors about Odense’s past from the Viking Age of the 8th-11th centuries to today. A leading Danish port city on the island of Fyn, Odense also became an important industrial center in the 19th century and was home to five different tobacco and cigar companies, including Erik Stokkebye A/S, which would eventually become Peter Stokkebye, famously known for producing pipe and roll-your-own tobaccos.
The exhibit, entitled “Farvel & Tobak,” is composed entirely of artifacts in the collection of Erik Poul Stokkebye, the son of Erik Peter Stokkebye, who established the family’s tobacco shop and tobacco manufacturing center in Odense in 1882. The current exhibit is a revival of an older exhibit of the same name that was on constant display at the Montergarden Museum since its founding in 1948 to some time in the early 1960s. Since then, the old exhibit’s artifacts had been held in storage by the Stokkebye family. While going through boxes containing some of his family’s tobacco-related paraphernalia, Erik Michael Stokkebye, who now produces 4th Generation by Erik Stokkebye pipe tobaccos, thought that the museum might want to put all of the artifacts back on display. After seeing the items and looking back on details and records of the old exhibit, the Montergarden Museum agreed to return it to its public space through December 2019.
