WHERE APRONS GO TO RETIRE

IUKA, Mississippi - One July day in 2011, the Apron Museum in Iuka, Mississippi, received a small bib apron shaped like a rabbit, its frame embroidered with front paws mischievously digging into two sewn-on pockets.

- Maggie Hennessy

The apron arrived with a typed letter from its 81-year-old owner, Ms Nelda Young, who lived in Jacksonville, Florida.

Her aunt had made the apron for her in 1934, when Ms Young was four and living in Kansas. For decades, she had kept it wrapped in tissue in a drawer.

"I simply could not think, after my demise, of it being tossed in some trash pile," she wrote.

Of her four children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, "nobody wanted to give my bunny apron a home".

Fortunately, she had recently read an article about the little museum dedicated to aprons.

"There was a need for a place to send all these aprons before we started," said Mrs Carolyn Terry, 74, who founded the museum with her husband Henry Terry, 73, in 2006. "We're meeting that need."

The stout brick structure, in a quiet street two hours east of Memphis, Tennessee, and bookended by church steeples, houses some 6,000 aprons dating back to the 1860s.

Displayed on walls, mannequins and racks, and draped on clothes lines hanging from the tin-print ceiling, the collection runs the gamut: domestic armour from 19th-century homesteads; exquisite, lacy Claudia McGraw aprons (status symbols of the 1930s); branded garments from Alka Seltzer and Progressive Insurance; and "manly" backyard BBQ bibs.

"Yes, I'm a feminist," one apron proclaims, positioned close to several 1950s-era aprons appliqued with women in flouncy dresses with amply padded breasts.

Few objects have endured alongside humankind like the humble apron, cradling eggs and catching sauce, ale, paint, oil and blood.