The curious history of the clothespeg

"By the early 20th century the equivalent of 500,000 board-feet of lumber (perhaps 700 tonnes) a year, in the form of sawmill waste, were being pulled from the Green Mountains to make pegs at a rate of more than 20,000 a day. The Smith-Moore peg is a triumph of design, equally pleasing when mini (to clip a sprig of lavender to a martini glass, or a favour to a wedding menu) or when maxi, as in Claes Oldenburg’s 14-metre-high steel “Clothespin” in Philadelphia. In 150 years, this item has not been improved on. .. In 2009 the last domestic peg clittered off the production line, and the last owner of the National Clothespin Company was buried under a five-foot reclining version, in grey granite, that looked as dead as he was.

Odd then, but true, that at the same moment, in various places, sales of pegs began to soar. In 2007 Asda, a supermarket chain, reported that British sales had risen by 1,400% in the first four months of the year compared with the year before. Such a spike was mystifying, and a shock. Moreover, plastic pegs (which degraded in sunlight) were losing out to traditional wooden ones. The switch to wood was a by-product of nascent hipster culture, with its love of beards, craft beer, bicycles-with-baskets, milk-rounds and all things retro; the return to pegs, though, seemed part-caused by guilt at the amount of carbon dioxide, 1.5kg, emitted by each cycle of a tumble-drier. The two trends together resulted in a renaissance. Along the back-roads of both New and Old England, smaller companies sprang up again to make thousands of wooden artisan pegs of good hazel and ash."