Clothing, for people living in Whitmore, was mostly sewn at home for the women and girls, including underwear. Families had their own traditions for clothing, especially for girls. Women's clothing was long, full, and made of cotton or wool.

Most of the clothing for men and boys was purchased. Boys' and men's underwear was purchased from the Montgomery Ward catalog or Penney's in town, if the family could afford it. The boys bought their pants after they got to a certain age, but usually their mother made the shirts.

Every homemaker wore an apron:

I never saw my grandmother without an apron. Colored for the kitchen and starched white for Sunday and when she was "at home."

One woman dressed in the morning with five aprons. As she completed milking the cows, feeding the chickens, cooking breakfast and cleaning up, cooking dinner and cleaning up, she would remove the apron for that task. When she got down to the white apron she wore for "best", she would make herself a cup of tea and "set and rest for a spell."

The women wore camisole tops. Mollie Cochran St. John, who grew up in Whitmore, talked about her school clothes in the early nineteen-hundreds:

We used to have to wear these black bloomers to school. They came down to just above your knees, with elastic in them, like pantaloons. All the girls wore them, I guess because when you'd get on the swing or you'd get on the bars at school, you weren't showing anything. Mother made them out of black cotton.

In the wintertime we had to wear long white cotton socks, and suspenders to hold them up, over the pantaloons. These elastic suspenders had elastic around the waist hooked together in the back. Then the elastic straps came down here with garters on it. When there was snow, you wore long underwear, too. Long white socks that went all the way up to your hips, ugly things. And as soon as you got out of sight of the house, you unfastened your garters and rolled your stockings down.

Everybody hated those black bloomers with a passion. They had to be washed and ironed. I would've taken those off if I could have gotten by with it.

A gift of dress yardage from an in-law was an appropriate present at Christmas, to make a new dress for Sunday. The next year it became the "second best dress" and so on. One interviewee said, "In the early 1900s flour sacks were a prize. And the sugar sacks, they had little red trim going through them, and they were fancy. I can even remember when I had those pretty white sugar sacks on the line, I just loved them. They made great dish towels, oh goodness yes."

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