Three Forged Carbon Steel Barber Shears, Kleencut Acme Shear Company, American, c. 1930–1960

The Piece

Three pairs of American barber shears, hot forged in carbon steel between the wars and the Eisenhower years, the long, pointed, finger-tang hair-cutting shears that hung on the barber's belt and lay in the dresser drawer of every American household that cut its own hair. Each is forged in one piece from the ring to the point, with slender blades ground to a fine taper, a flat slotted pivot screw, oval finger rings and the hooked finger rest, or tang, beneath the lower ring that lets the barber steady the shear on the little finger and open and close it all day without tiring the hand. They are the shape the American trade settled on in the 1920s, and they have not been improved on since.

The first pair is stamped Kleencut, Forged Steel, U.S.A. at the pivot, the trademark of the Acme Shear Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, first used in March 1920 and by the end of the Second World War the best-known shear name in the country. The second pair is stamped Forged Steel, U.S.A. without a brand, the mark of one of the Connecticut and New Jersey forges that supplied the barber supply houses under their own names. The third pair, the longest of the three, is unmarked, with a maker's cartouche at the pivot worn past reading by decades of thumbs. Together they make a graded set, short to long, and the differences between them, in the sweep of the tang, the turn of the ring and the taper of the point, are the differences between three forges working the same pattern.

All three are complete and sound. They open and close freely on their original pivot screws, the blades meet along their full length and the points are intact. The steel has the soft gray tone and scattered dark spotting of old forged carbon steel, with light surface rust at the pivots and the fine nicks and polish to the blades that come from a working life; none is bent, cracked, repinned or sharpened past use. Offered as found, cleaned and lightly oiled, not polished or refinished, so that the forging marks and the stamps remain.

History & Provenance

The forged steel shear was one of the industries that built the Connecticut valley. The Acme Shear Company began in 1867 as the one-man shop of Leo Renz on a mill race in Naugatuck, moved to Fairfield in 1880, and under the Wheeler family in the twentieth century grew into the largest maker of shears and scissors in the world, a title the trade press was giving it by 1946. Its Kleencut line, registered as a trademark in 1960 on a first use of March 1, 1920, was the hot-forged carbon steel shear that the five-and-dime, the hardware store and the barber supply house sold by the gross: hair shears, household shears, dressmaker's shears and pinking shears, all stamped with the brand, the words Forged Steel and the country of origin. Acme Shear became Acme United in 1971, moved its forging to North Carolina and then overseas, and closed the Bridgeport plant in 1996, which makes a Kleencut shear stamped U.S.A. a product of the American forge in its prime.

The barber shear itself is a product of the American haircut. When the safety razor took shaving out of the barbershop after the First World War, the barber made his living on the haircut, and the weekly trim became a ritual of American manhood from the small town to the city. The trade wanted a long, light, pointed shear that could cut all day, and the finger tang, borrowed from the tailor's trimming shear, gave the barber a third point of control. Acme, Wiss of Newark, Clauss of Fremont, Ohio and a dozen smaller forges made the pattern in carbon steel until stainless and Japanese imports displaced it in the 1960s and 1970s, and the old forged shears went into the drawer, where they cut string, flowers and the children's hair for another fifty years.

The Kleencut pair is marked and attributed to the Acme Shear Company; the second pair is marked Forged Steel, U.S.A. and offered as an unattributed American forge; the third is unmarked and offered as unattributed. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: hot-forged carbon steel rather than stainless, the flat slotted pivot screw, the stamped Forged Steel and U.S.A. marks and the Kleencut trademark in use from 1920 are all consistent with manufacture between about 1930 and 1960.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Three forged shears in graded sizes are a composition before you do anything with them. Hung on a row of brass hooks in a mudroom, fanned on a tray on a dresser, pinned to a linen board in a deep frame or stood points-down in a stoneware crock on a desk, they bring the weight and the line of the American forge into a room, and the gray steel keeps company with walnut, leather, brass and old mirror glass. They belong in a barbershop or salon, a gentleman's dressing room, a study, a workshop or a collected kitchen, and they still cut: string, stems, paper and hair. For a shop or designer client it is the marked, American, industrial steel vignette that styles a shelf of smalls and sells on the Kleencut name.