Beginning in about 1852, John B. Smith designed and built machinery for manufacturing clothes-pins. He manufactured both the machines and the clothes-pins themselves. In 1868 he designed and patented an improved machine that takes a rectangular billet of wood and performs a series of operations on it to produce a finished clothes-pin. Smith appears to have been quite successful because he continued to make improvements to his design and became well-known locally. A later version of his machine was capable of turning out 125 clothes-pins per minute.

By 1914, Nathan Smith was operating N. A. Smith Machine Co. of Sunapee, makers of clothes-pin and handle machinery.

Information Sources

• The 1868 Briggs & Co. New Hampshire Business Directory lists John B. Smith of Sunapee as a maker of clothes-pins. Remarkably, there were three other such makers in New Hampshire at the time.
• S. L. Farman's 1881 New Hampshire Register, Farmer's Almanac and Business Directory lists J. B. Smith of Sunapee as a maker of clothes-pins.
• Temple & Farrington's 1883 Manchester Directory lists John B. Smith of Sunapee as a maker of woodworking machinery.
• The Wooden and Willow-Ware Trade Review for 1904-06-23 has the following news item.

  CLOTHES PIN MACHINERY FOR GERMANY.
  Nathan Smith, of Sunapee. N. H., has received a contract to build five Clothes Pin machines for a German concern, the contract being placed with him by a visitor who came to this country to see the St. Louis Exposition, says the Mancheater Union.

• The State of New Hampshire Reports, 1914 lists N. A. Smith Machine Co. of Sunapee as a "clothes pin and handle machinery foundry".
• The July-Sept 1918 edition of the Granite State Monthly has this paragraph:

  John B. Smith, a Sunapee boy, invented and patented a clothespin machine in 1868, which with a few minor improvements leads the world today in the making of clothespins, turning out one hundred and twenty-five finished pins per minute. Mr. Smith in his declining years, interested himself in the making of telescopes, selling one to the Cambridge Observatory. His heirs still have in their possession the largest he ever built, having sixinch lenses.

• The 1941 The Story of Sunapee, by John Henry Bartlett, has this snippet.

  About 1852 John B. Smith built three shops for making clothes-pin machinery, and clothes pins. He patented these...

• History of Goshen, New Hampshire, by Walter Ralph Nelson, 1957, has this snippet: "Nathan Foster of Washington put in a clothespin-machine and operated it for some time, until Mr. Gunnison bought one of the improved Smith machines then made in Sunapee."