‘All-Purpose Uniforms’: Tishomingo County Couple Runs the Nation’s Only Apron Museum

Carolyn Terry pulled out an old scrapbook of photos from a bookshelf near the back of the Apron Museum in Iuka, Mississippi. She flipped through a few pages before landing on a black-and-white photo of an older white woman sitting in a chair on the sidewalk in front of her house, a white waist apron adorned over her dress. 

“Here’s that one,” she said, a red-painted fingernail pointing at the photo. “This is the first apron’s grandmother, and it’s the best picture. I’ve got a bigger one. It’s the best picture of somebody in an apron because people got photographed, but they took off their aprons.”

Dressed in a book-themed, brown-and-peach apron laid atop a blue-and-white blouse, Terry gestured toward another black-and-white picture, this one framed, of men and women posing for a group photo. In it, women are donning their waist aprons.

“Did you ever hear of the Delany Sisters? One of them was the second Black female dentist in New York State,” Terry told the Mississippi Free Press. “The Delany Sisters said their dad was a slave. He never talked about being a slave because he was 7 years old.” 

“He said that when the Civil War ended, he was a helper in the kitchen, and he had an apron on,” she continued. “He took it off and swung it and said, ‘We’re free. We’re free.’ Doesn’t that give you chills?”

Carolyn Terry knows as much as there is to know about aprons. In 2005, she quit her job at Walmart headquarters in the legal and real-estate department, bored with looking at paperwork and legal documents all day. 

She moved from Arkansas to Iuka and began working in genealogy out of her home. However, Carolyn didn’t have enough room to properly use her house as a workspace. Eventually, she saw a for-rent sign on a building in downtown Iuka, and an idea struck her. 

“It was an ugly building—I mean horrible; nobody wanted it—and I thought, “I’m gonna rent me a space and do something creative,”” she recalled. 

After remodeling the building, she and her husband, Henry, opened a coffee and nutrition shop and rented space for a quilting and fabric shop. Google led her to EllyAnne Geisel’s “The Apron Book: Making, Wearing and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort.” More research led her to local resident Peggy Harris, whom Terry calls “the Queen of Aprons.” 

“She was one of the experts. I remember she called one time. She got an apron from the Kennedy family,” she said.

Inside the museum, a purple apron with a golden crown on its chest along with a purple flower attached commemorates Harris who passed away in 2020. 

“My grandson bought that (apron) in Germany.  I put the flower on it. He bought it at a castle that they model the Disney World castle after, and I was gonna have that embroidered in gold,” Terry said. 

After email and phone discussions with Geisel and Harris, Carolyn Terry affirmed her decision. She created a Facebook page and officially opened The Apron Museum in September 2006. She and her husband have been running the museum for more than 20 years in Tishomingo County, located in northeast Mississippi.

Terry’s collection of aprons has grown to at least 5,000, she estimates, spanning a variety of categories: holiday-themed aprons, World War I aprons, aprons featuring state iconography or cartoons. The museum even has a Progressive apron signed in-character by the actress who plays Flo in the insurance company’s televised commercials.

“They could go ahead and do the fifth or third or second. We didn’t care. We just wanted the first (apron museum) to be in the South. I would’ve hated to miss the opportunity to have the museum and then find out it’s in Colorado (when) we could have just easily done it,” she explained.

Everyday, Workday and Fancy Aprons

In her book, author EllyAnne Geisel wrote that the Bible refers to aprons of a fashion in Genesis 3:7. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve realized their nudity and sewed fig leaves together to make coverings that amounted to functional aprons.

“No amount of progress or technological advancement or fickle fashion tastes can change the fact that an apron has always been the best, most commonsensical means of covering up and protecting our clothes from grime,” the book reads. 

Immigrants and settlers brought their aprons to America, which were simply styled, ankle-length and made of rugged cloth. Women tucked their dresses into their apron waistbands to clear and plow the fields, and they unfurled the aprons to carry grain to chickens, to gather eggs and to harvest vegetables from the garden. 

“For those who stayed in cities and towns in the east … the all-purpose apron was the uniform of a domestic, a nurse, a seamstress or a factory worker,” Geisel wrote in her book. “And for those born with silver spoons in their mouths or well-heeled by marriage, aprons were a stylish accessory.”

When ladies of leisure got involved in stitchery, the apron became a canvas for the domestic art of embroidery. Fine cotton was hard to come by during the Great Depression, so women used whatever they could come across: a feed sack, carpenter’s cotton or other recycled fabrics. 

Entering the postwar era, the apron made its way into the home of the middle class. Homemakers sewed their own aprons using patterns published in Simplicity or McCall’s or from newspaper syndicates. 

“These designs reflected their aspirations to be modern, social and stylish. Fabrics were bold with color and adornments became more playful and less functional,” Geisel wrote. “At the same time, modern household appliances of the 1950s gave homemakers something previously unheard of—free time.”

Women used that time to tap into their creativity by making aprons that reflected their personalities. Homemakers were dressing up to stay home and had aprons for every chore and special occasion. 

“They whipped up theme aprons, holiday aprons, aprons that matched the tablecloth on the bridge table, mother-daughter aprons, and daughter-dolly aprons,” Geisel wrote. “Aprons even became a venue for household humor, as a wearable billboard of bon mots.”

For the first time, husbands donned aprons specific to their new pastime, manning the grill. Thus began the official heyday of the American apron, which came in three types: workday, everyday and fancy aprons.

Workday aprons—full-bodied with bib fronts—were the most protective, crafted from sturdy materials. Everyday aprons were waist aprons or “full” styles made using lighter materials than workday aprons. Fancy aprons, meanwhile, weren’t meant to be protective; rather, they were worn as accessories to an outfit or for special occasions. These were dainty confections made of delicate fabric.

“The basic apron constructions consist of the waist apron, the bib apron and the smock apron. Any of these styles could serve as workday, everyday or fancy aprons, depending on the fabrics and decorative elements used,” Geisel wrote. 

The Women’s Movement of the 1960s saw women join the workforce to seek fulfillment outside the home. Women tossed their aprons straight into the giveaway bag, and the historical connection that tied modern women to older generations was snipped. For a new generation of women, Geisel argues, the apron was a relic of values and a lifestyle that no longer applied.

‘Wash, Iron, Tag It’ 

Henry Terry grew up in a house with his grandparents on a farm in the Delta. He remembers his grandmother waking up in the morning and putting on her apron before beginning her farm work for the day. She would use her apron as a sack to gather eggs or to pick vegetables from the garden. Only when the work day was over and the sun went down would his grandmother remove her apron.

During an in-person interview with the MFP, Henry walked over to a rack of aprons inside the Apron Museum, pulling one out that he believed looked similar to the apron his grandmother wore. The apron, bought in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, is an off-white color sporting stains and patched-up holes. Someone wore this apron during the Depression era, the couple explained, when many women couldn’t afford fabrics to make new aprons, so they used what they had.

“We bought this one sight unseen,” Henry said. “A lady we go to church with said her daughter worked for an auction company, and they had a sale come up with about 50 aprons. And this is one we wanted to bid on, so we talked about it, and we gave a bid. A couple weeks later, when the box got here, this was one of the first ones to come out the box.”

Next, he pulled a long blue-and-white striped apron with a diamond-shaped patch in the center from a rack. Once Henry put the apron over his head, the apron’s size became even more noticeable as it draped over his tall frame. This apron, the largest in the museum, belonged to Dr. John Longest, a medical doctor and the director of the student health center at Mississippi State University in 1948. 

“The medical center on campus is named after him,” Henry Terry noted. 

Most donations come from the original owners’ grandkids who don’t want them anymore or would rather donate them to the museum than throw them away or sell them. Carolyn attaches tags to the aprons that provide history about the apron: who donated it, when that person donated it, where it came from, and who wore or made it. 

“When we process the apron, we wash it, iron it, tag it and then log it. I should be doing a lot more, but it takes a lot of money and time,” she said. “I wish we could photograph it, put it in a category and then you could do a query and see all the aprons donated from Australia, Mississippi (and so on).”

The museum contains many fancy aprons with certain racks holding holiday-themed aprons with Santa Claus’ visage on them or waist aprons that represent states like Florida. The museum stores some aprons that belonged to Claudia McGraw, who was also known as “The Apron Lady.” Carolyn showed this reporter one of McGraw’s aprons, a blue-and-white checkered waist apron with two lace pockets. 

“The people who bought her beautiful aprons were Greta Garbo (and) Eleanor Roosevelt way back when,” she said. 

Henry drew attention to a small, yellow waist apron with a white band that snaps around the waist. Dr. Cory Synhorst SerVaas invented this style of apron, known as the Cory Jane clamp-on apron, in the 1940s, designing it to stay in place and to fit differently sized waists. 

“Her boyfriend convinced her to get a patent on it. They later married, and she became a medical doctor,” Henry explained. “They sold these to a lot of home economic departments where they were teaching girls how to sew.”

‘They Come to Us’

More than a simple collection of differently designed aprons, the Apron Museum’s assorted fabrics have stories attached to their origins and ownership history.

Henry Terry’s white-gloved hands lifted the top of a white box and gently picked up a flimsy pink apron with purple flowers decorating the bottom and the apron’s two pockets. Written across the breast in yellow lettering are the words “Souvenir of France.” An 83-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington, donated the apron to the museum in 2013. 

 ”Soldiers sent ’em home. One of ’em sent ’em to his aunt, and I think she’s got the packaging that he sent from France,” he explained before setting the apron back in its box and pulling out another item, this one an off-white pillow cover with blue flowers that similarly has the words “Souvenir of France” as well as “1919” written in the colors of the French flag.

“Carolyn washed this. She got it, and it faded some. Of course, this is very fragile. This is silk. This is over a hundred years old. These are some of our prize aprons,” he said. 

The Terrys organize the aprons by category: jean aprons, birthday aprons, holiday aprons, flower aprons, college aprons, newspaper aprons and name aprons. 

“Linda’s got a good story,” Carolyn said while pulling a white lacy apron from the name-apron rack. “Linda” is stitched across the bottom of the waist apron in bright red capital letters, one of six aprons bearing someone’s name in the museum. 

“She’s from Ocean Springs. Her German grandmother made this for her in about 1953 when she was 5 years old,” Carolyn explained. “Her grandmother, Hannah, said she and her siblings remember floating on a mattress in the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania that killed 2,200 people.”

Two teachers from Hattiesburg created another of the museum’s aprons, a white one with names of notable famous people from Mississippians on it like Elvis Presley, Walter Payton, Jim Hanson and others handwritten in different reflective marker colors.

Most of the museum’s visitors come from outside of the state, the Terrys said. Not as many locals are aware of the Apron Museum’s presence in Iuka, and those who do normally bring visiting family members. People call ahead of time to let the married couple know they’ll be stopping by so that the Terrys can be flexible toward those who have scheduling conflicts. 

“(One visitor) was an aerospace engineer that had been working at Lockheed in Florence,” Carolyn recounted. “She called and said, ‘I’ve been here for two weeks. I’ve never been to Mississippi, and I want to see the museum .’ For people like her, we started opening in the evenings.”

Meeting new people is the most enjoyable aspect of running the museum, Henry expressed. People come from all across the country to visit their museum to learn about aprons and to converse about their histories. 

“They come to us,” he said. 

The Apron Museum (110 W. Eastport St., Iuka) is generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays, but interested parties can make appointments to visit the museum any day of the week by calling 662-279-2390. For more information, email apronfriends@yahoo.com or visit the museum’s Facebook page.