Holding Their Own for a Long Time Now : Clothespins: These utilitarian smidgens of Americana were more or less invented in the 1840s and carry on in the face of stiff competition.

Don’t bother to look for clothespin in the Oxford English Dictionary because you won’t find it.

Clothespins, which these days probably appear as often in arts and crafts creations as on clotheslines, owe little to the English (who would call them clothespegs ) or to any other nation, for that matter. They developed in the United States sometime during the 1840s and by mid-century were well established.

Harper’s magazine in March, 1852, illustrated a man making clothespins; a year later D. M. Smith, of Springfield, Vt., was granted a patent for a spring-type clothespin. Mark Twain mentioned clothespins in “Sketches” (1869). If the number per sales order is any clue, by century’s end, clothespins had inundated the land.

In 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. sold the traditional clothespin--wooden, with a lengthwise slot--in boxes of 30 dozen (360) for 32 cents a box; not to be outdone, Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold five-gross boxes (720) for 50 cents each. But the simple, inexpensive standard model was threatened by spring-type devices that Sears in 1897 couldn’t say enough nice things about.

Three were promoted, the most extensively clothespin “No. 16738. Metallic Spring Clothes Pin. Will never split or fall off in the severest storm or freeze to the clothes in the greatest frost. It is easily applied and removed. It goes on any thickness of clothes and no baskets are necessary to carry them in. You can carry as many pins as are required for your entire wash in one hand by placing them on your fingers. They are applied to the clothesline the same as any other clothespin. They are made of wire heavily galvanized, so that it is impossible for them to rust. They have been tested in all sorts of weather and found to be all we claim.” The price: seven cents per dozen, 80 cents per gross.

In the early 20th Century, clothespins were essential clothesline accessories and their uses began to multiply, as evidenced by articles in popular magazines such as “Making Toys of Clothes-Pins” (Harper’s Bazaar, January, 1909) and “Fun With Nothing but Clothespins” (Ladies’ Home Journal, August, 1908). By the 1930s, Popular Mechanics touted the many uses of clothespins for the weekend dabbler, and School Arts magazine described how clothespin tools helped children work with clay, plaster of Paris and metal.

Clothespin dolls, widely heralded by the 1940s, later evolved into ballerinas (“Enchanted Ballet: Clothespin Dancers,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December, 1978) and even Christmas ornaments (“Recapture a Childhood Christmas,” Southern Living, December, 1984).

In the early 1950s, despite competition from plastic models, the traditional, forked wooden clothespin was doing well--so well that Business Week devoted a feature article in November, 1950, to one small company, the Spencer Wood Products Co., of Owen County, Ind., that produced 1.75 million clothespins weekly, making a nice profit. Like many of its American competitors, Spencer also made other wood products, from tongue depressors to broom handles.

But by 1954 American clothespin manufacturers were feeling the pinch of foreign competition and petitioned Washington for protection. Some help came, with Jimmy Carter being one of the last Presidents to approve major quotas on certain foreign imports, including clothespins. But other developments were doing the clothespin in: Americans moved to homes with electric or gas dryers. Synthetic fabrics and sophisticated washing machines rendered some clothes almost dry at the end of the final rinse cycle.

Then, of course, there was a return to a simpler technology that probably predates the clothespin. In the Sears, Roebuck catalogue’s fall-winter 1966-67 edition, in the same section that gave clothespins brief notice, drying racks of all shapes and sizes were illustrated, giving consumers an alternative to displaying undies outdoors.

Still, the clothespin merits a round of applause for hanging in there so long.