Who uses clothespins anymore?

One of my memories of growing up in the rural South was using wooden clothespins to hang clothes on the line to dry. We’d hang the clothes tip to tip (by the shoulder or waist), the two pieces held together by a clothespin on either side. This process was much more efficient than hanging each piece separately.

I also remember boys using clothespins to hold cards on the spokes of their bikes to create a flapping sound when the wheels turned. You could hear them a mile away.

When I came across a bag of old wooden clothespins at an auction some months ago, they evoked those memories of wash day. I’ve written about wash day before; I have three washboards as decoration in my basement laundry room.

I didn’t buy those clothespins at auction. Who needs them these days? I just take my clothes down to the basement, put them in my washer to wash and dryer to dry. They don’t have the fresh outdoor smell from my childhood, but this new way is much much easier and even more efficient. And, I don’t have to wait all day for clothes to dry or postpone washing because it’s raining outside.

Those wooden clothespins were very basic, one piece of wood split up the center with two carved prongs on both sides. According to Wikipedia, they were first made by the Shakers, who didn’t apply for patents for them. A writer of the book called “Ms. Inventor” credited Shakers founder Ann Lee with inventing the clothespin. In 1853, according to Wikipedia, the clothespin with a wire spring was invented by a man named David M. Smith of Vermont.

At a later auction, I came across three neat plastic figural clothespins, unlike any I had seen before. They were pink, and the heads were not your usual round ones. They were the carved heads of a dog, cat and baby. The legs were curved at the bottom and the center opening was wavy.

On the back was embossed: Rogers Clean-Grip Pat. Pend. I wasn’t able to find any information about the maker, and only found a few references via Google. In most instances, someone was selling them on Ebay or another marketplace site.

They were nifty looking, although the baby looked a little scary to me.

I wasn’t able to find a clothespin museum or an organization of clothespin collectors (there’s usually a collectors group for just about anything), likely because there’s very little to do to change its style. But one company’s re-tooling of the clothespin was named by Business Week as one of the winners of an Industrial Design Excellence Award in 1999.  The new-styled Clip ‘n Stay clothespin was produced for EKCO Housewares.

Here’s what I also found out about the lowly clothespin:

The most famous one is a 45-foot-tall steel structure across the street from Philadelphia’s City Hall, on the west side. It was erected in 1976 by Claes Oldenburg.

The Smithsonian Institution held an exhibit in 1998 called “American Clothespins,” which drew large crowds. The museum has the patent models of clothespins created from 1852-1887. Some are pretty unusual.