There’s a small granite monument in a cemetery in Middlesex, Vermont. It’s shaped like a clothespin — five feet tall, carved from stone. The man buried beneath it, Jack Crowell, was the last owner of the National Clothespin Company. He originally requested that the monument include a working spring so children could play on it, but the stone workers talked him out of it (Wikipedia).
It’s a strange thing, a five-foot stone clothespin. But what’s stranger is the history behind it — because for about sixty years, a single spring-loaded clothespin design turned a few quiet Vermont towns into what The New York Times once called “the Silicon Valley of clothespin manufacturing” (Wikipedia).
Before the Spring
Clothespins are old. The Shaker community made simple one-piece wooden pegs — two prongs, a knob at the top, no moving parts — sometime in the 1700s. The pegs worked by wedging the prongs apart; the wood wanted to return to its resting state, so it squeezed whatever you stuck between them. In England, Romani craftspeople made similar pegs from hickory, ash, or willow and sold them door to door through the 19th century (Wikipedia).
But during the 1700s, if you look at paintings and prints of laundry day, you won’t see clothespins. People draped wash over bushes, low tree branches, and lines strung between army camps. The clothespin as we know it — the thing that actually clipped fabric to a line — didn’t show up in the historical record until the early 1800s (Wikipedia).
The first patent came in 1809, filed by a Frenchman named Jérémie Victor Opdebec. His design was a one-piece wooden affair, two prongs part of the same chassis, gripping by compression. An improved American version got a patent in 1832. These were fine. They worked. But they had a problem: the wood had to be strong enough to spring back, which meant it had to be thick, which meant the grip was limited (hhhistory.com).
Then, in 1853, a Vermont inventor named David M. Smith solved the problem with a completely different approach.
The Invention That Changed Everything
Smith’s design was, on the surface, absurdly simple. He took two separate pieces of wood and connected them with a fulcrum and a spring. Pinch the top halves together, the bottom jaws open. Release, and the spring snaps them shut. It was a lever — basic mechanical advantage, the kind of thing you learn in middle school physics (Wikipedia).
The spring was the key. A separate piece of metal could be thin, strong, and precisely tensioned in a way that wood never could be. The wooden halves didn’t need to flex anymore — they just needed to pivot. That meant they could be lighter, thinner, and cheaper to carve. Smith’s design was granted U.S. Patent 10,163, titled “Spring-clamp for clothes-lines” (USPTO via Wikipedia).
Smith was a prolific Vermont inventor. One source credits his violin playing with giving him the creative patience to solve practical problems — that the meditative quality of practicing scales led him to see mechanical solutions that others missed (hhhistory.com). Whether or not that’s romanticized, his design stuck. But it had one weakness: the spring was a separate component. You needed three pieces — two wooden halves and a metal spring — and assembling them required a worker to hold everything in alignment.
Thirty-four years later, another Vermonter named Solon E. Moore fixed that.
The Coiled Fulcrum
In 1887, Moore added what he called a “coiled fulcrum” — a single piece of wire that served triple duty. It acted as the spring that forced the jaws shut, the fulcrum on which the two halves rocked, AND the connector that held the whole thing together. One piece of wire, three jobs, no separate components (Wikipedia).
That single innovation slashed manufacturing costs. The National Clothespin Company opened that same year in Montpelier, Vermont, to produce Moore’s design. The U.S. Clothespin Company followed. And then Vermont went insane for clothespins.
At its peak, Montpelier and the surrounding towns were producing tens of thousands of clothespins every day. The National Clothespin Company consumed 500,000 board-feet of lumber annually. Vermont was, for a brief and peculiar moment, the most important clothespin-producing region on Earth (Wikipedia).
The Clothespin Wars
In 1909, a National Clothespin Company employee named Allan Moore figured out how to make the spring even cheaper — by eliminating one of the coils in the wire. He left the company, borrowed money from a local entrepreneur, and opened a competing factory directly across the street from his old employer.
His leaner design won. The new National Clothespin Company rapidly overtook the original U.S.C. Co., which eventually closed before the end of the 1940s. The National company survived on a contract with F.W. Woolworth’s department stores (Wikipedia).
But the real competition wasn’t across the street. It was across the Atlantic. After World War I, cheap Swedish clothespins began flooding the American market. In 1920, it cost 58 cents to manufacture a gross of clothespins in Vermont. Swedish imports sold for 48 cents a gross. Vermont’s congressional delegation repeatedly called for protective tariffs, but got nowhere (Wikipedia).
After World War II, the electric clothes dryer started killing demand for clothespins altogether. The National Clothespin Company survived by diversifying into plastics, including plastic clothespins, which were only a small part of their overall production. They hung on through a disastrous fire in 1978, through decades of cheap Chinese imports, through the slow death of the clothesline.
The last American-made clothespin came off the National Clothespin Company’s production line in 2009 (Wikipedia).
The C47
Here’s the thing about clothespins that nobody outside the film industry knows: on a movie set, a wooden clothespin is called a C47, or a “47,” or a “bullet,” or “ammo.” The name comes from the original designation in the studio prop catalog.
When film lights get hot — and they get very hot — gaffers and grips need to clip color correction gels and diffusion material to the barn doors on the lights. Plastic clothespins would melt. Metal ones would conduct the heat and burn whoever touched them. But a wooden clothespin? It doesn’t transmit heat very well. You can leave it clipped to a thousand-watt light for an hour and still pick it up barehanded (Wikipedia).
Production assistants and electricians will clip a dozen C47s to their utility belts at the start of a shoot, much like an old west gunslinger carrying extra ammunition. That’s where the “bullet” nickname comes from (Wikipedia).
The C47 is one of the most-used tools on any film set, and almost nobody in the audience has ever heard of it. If you’ve watched a movie lit in the last century, a clothespin made it possible.
What the Spring Was Really Doing
Stand in front of a clothesline and look at the clip in your hand. Two pieces of wood. One piece of wire. The wire is a spring (providing the clamping force), a fulcrum (the pivot point that lets the jaws open), and a connector (holding the whole assembly together). Three functions, one component, invented by a man in Vermont in 1887.
The Shaker clothespin was elegant in its simplicity — one piece of wood, no moving parts. Moore’s coiled fulcrum was elegant in its efficiency — one piece of wire, doing the work of three. That’s the design that won. That’s the design that built an industry, sustained a town, and survived for over a century.
And now the last American factory that made them is gone, and the only monument left is a five-foot granite clothespin in a Vermont cemetery, with no working spring.
If you still hang your wash — and plenty of people do — grab a handful of wooden clothespins from the line. Feel the spring flex. You’re holding a piece of Vermont manufacturing history, a design that hasn’t fundamentally changed since 1887, and a tool that once made movies possible.
The spring is doing three jobs. It always has been. You just never noticed.