The Apron Museum

22-Apr-09
Kim R

Apron museum in northern Mississippi recounts more than cooking life

Carolyn Terry cheerfully tells people to look for her apron museum between the two highest steeples in this slow drawl of a town.

Or simply ask. Someone will point you to the new business on Eastport Street, the one with an apron painted on its window and birdhouses and other art spilling out its doors, a colorful cornucopia of local talent.
Why aprons? Why does the enthusiastic, almost evangelistic, Carolyn Terry collect, display and, sometimes, sell them?

(She doesn't so much sell aprons as adopt them out, making sure the prospective owner knows the history and significance of the piece.)

Her expressive eyes light up at that question, and this ambassadress of aprons gives a lovely, impromptu speech: Aprons touch everybody, Carolyn says. There's not anything else as 'common' that's also art. If I collected paintbrushes, that would mean something to a few. But aprons mean something to us all.

And it's not really about the aprons; it's about the people who wore them.

Named the Pine Slab Shop after a restaurant that once inhabited the same space, Carolyn's collection started with a homemade paisley apron her Mississippi grandmother made for her when she was a child. It hangs on the wall in an intimate spot by her desk.

In 1990, she inherited a trove of family aprons, and the collection took off. Nobody collected them much earlier, she insists, because everybody had them and assumed they were always going to be around. It would be like collecting, say, cell phones right now.

Carolyn believes her apron museum is unique - The one and only, my daughter calls it - although there already are museums for just about everything else, including a New Orleans menu museum she discovered in a Google search.

There are several better-known apron collectors who have been written about in national magazines. Carolyn calls them Apron Royalty and says to qualify for this designation you must have written a book on the subject and be willing to share.

All our lady-in-waiting Carolyn lacks is writing the book, which she plans to do. She has just as many aprons and is certainly willing to share.

Daily she expands her knowledge on the subject, from care and storage of old textiles, to aprons depicted in fine art - Rubens to Rockwell.

Many visitors come by just to look, to admire the aprons hanging on the wall, on racks and on a kaleidoscopic clothesline.

From the soft, flour-sack work aprons to the sexy ones for entertaining, they are all here. There are Coca-Cola aprons and a pressman's apron from the Chicago Sun Times.

There are new ones made by local apron artists, including a popular and kicky style that makes use of old blue jeans. There are the funny barbecue aprons that say Hot Stuff and hundreds of familiar utilitarian models.

Carolyn believes that you can trace the economy of the nation through aprons and clearly see when families had not much money but the luxury of time.

The elaborate needlework on some of the aprons elicits sighs of admiration from today's young women who can't even find the time to cook, she says.