One of the conventional type, so called from its resemblance to a short section of a stove-pipe.
1855. Farmers! did you get up Know-Nothingism? No. It was got up amongst “stove-pipe hats” and patent black leather shoes.—Oregon Times, June.
1856. He did wear a stove-pipe black-shiny hat.—Knick. Mag., xlviii. 612 (Dec.).
1861. Those [the hats] of the grooms were ‘stove-pipes,’ of black fur, very tall and with very narrow rims.—Id., lvii. 620 (June).
1861. Our young men see a Gentile with a stove pipe hat on, a pair of big whiskers, and a cigar in his mouth. Oh, it looks so pretty, think our young men; and if they cannot get a cigar, they must have a pipe.—George A. Smith at Logan, Utah, Sept. 10: ‘Journal of Discourses,’ ix. 113.
1863. Those glistening silk “stove-pipe” arrangements are poor things for a very cold day, especially round the ears.—Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Feb. 19.
1872. If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt and a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.—Mark Twain, ‘Roughing It,’ ch. xvi.
1876. A brave North Carolinian had somehow and somewhere come in possession of a silk (“stove pipe”) hat, and had made himself conspicuous by persisting in wearing it, despite the advice and warnings of his companions.—‘Southern Hist. Soc. Papers,’ i. 383.
1890. One of the men had insisted upon wearing a “stove-pipe” hat from the East—which, to say the least, was inappropriate, and attracted almost as much attention as if he had worn a French bonnet.—Mrs. Custer, ‘Following the Guidon,’ p. 172 (N.Y.).
