The rise and fall of ornamental combs

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Julie Robinson Robards

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October 25, 2009

Carving hobby transforms into trend, family tradition

By JULIE ROBINSON ROBARDS, Collection Reflections The Press Republican Sun Oct 25, 2009, 11:26 PM EDT

A group of Hessian soldiers taken captive during the French and Indian War in the 1750s were skilled comb makers who passed the time carving cattle bone and horn.

They demonstrated the craft to their captors and an industry was born.

By the 1770s, Leominster, Mass., had become a center for comb manufacture, boasting 70 shops manned by a multitude of skilled horn smiths. Cattle horn was the material of choice, for it was a plentiful by-product of the beef industry and came in myriad shades from pale orange to deep brownish black. Choice horn was pale amber and whitish gray and was often clarified — or made translucent — by the application of heat and pressure before it was crafted into combs.

ENTER CELLULOID
By the mid 1800s, shell smiths also worked in what was now deemed The Comb City. These men were skilled in fabricating the shell of the hawksbill tortoise — a marine specie that was nearly hunted into extinction. Unlike horn, tortoiseshell did not fray and could be recycled. It was expensive and beautifully luxurious in pleasing mottled shades of deep brown, orange and amber.

Then, while on a buying trip to France in the late 1890s, Sterling Comb Company horn buyer Bernard Doyle was given a demonstration of a remarkable new plastic material called celluloid. Impressed by the beauty of celluloid and the ease with which it could be fabricated, he brought news of it back to The Comb City and it soon replaced horn and tortoise shell in the manufacture of both dressing and ornamental hair combs.

The first celluloid combs were produced in 1902 and made in imitation of ivory, amber and tortoiseshell.

The comb companies of Leominster flourished until 1914 and the dawn of World War I. The onset of war ushered in changing attitudes toward fashion, and women began to follow the leads of famous celebrities like Irene Castle, Coco Channel and Clara Bow — who were all sporting the trendy new bob haircut. Not all women cut their hair though, and there was still a demand for combs after the war ended.

HEIRLOOMS
Color was the hallmark of the Roaring Twenties and plain old-fashioned combs fell out of favor. Celluloid hair ornaments became smaller and were made in vibrant pearlescent laminates and studded with flashy rhinestones in contrasting colors. Eventually changing trends in hair fashion brought an end to the need for ornamental combs. By the late 1920s, most hair ornaments were safely tucked away as treasured keepsakes to be passed on as family heirlooms.

Julie Robinson Robards lives in Upper Jay. An antiques appraiser, she studied at the Institute for the Study of Antiques and Collectibles in Emmaus, Penn., is an advisor to Warman's Antiques and Collectible Price Guide and is a plastics historian with two published books on the subject of Celluloid. Since 1995, she has been a writer for AntiqueWeek Newspaper.
Contact her at her Web site: celluloidforever.com