A HOME FOR THE APRON

A tiny museum in Mississippi chronicles a century of family legacies, history and the evolution of womanhood

- MAGGIE HENNESSY

Inside the Apron Museum in Iuka, Mississippi. An apron from the 1950s. A Claudia McGraw apron.

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.

The apron arrived with a typed letter from its 81-year-old owner, Nelda Young, who lived in Jacksonville, Florida. Young’s aunt had made the apron for her in 1934, when Young was 4 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'd 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 Carolyn Terry, 74, who founded the museum with her husband, Henry Terry, 73, in 2006. “We're meeting that need.”