250 Pijpjes - Hoogboom Kapellen

Sint-Jozefskerk in Hoogboom — a village absorbed into the municipality of Kapellen in the 1977 Belgian municipal mergers — issued this piece as a parish token commemorating 250 years of the local clay pipe industry, the *pijpjes* trade that defined the regional economy through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kapellen's pipe-making workshops supplied markets across the Low Countries, and by the mid-1800s the industry had largely collapsed under competition from ceramic and later briar pipes.

The GMJ reference places this firmly in the 1985–86 wave of Belgian local commemorative bronzes, many struck by the same handful of Antwerp-area diesinkers working parish and municipal contracts simultaneously.