It was there, according to the 1992 book “Strong, Maine ‘Incorporated 1801’: An Historical Account of the Sandy River Settlement,” compiled by Lewis Brackley and Charles Lisherness, where a Bostonian exporter’s agent named Charles Forster observed “native boys” with impressively beautiful teeth selling and using wooden toothpicks.Īt that time, any self-respecting fastidious gentleman could purchase a toothpick made of bone, quill, ivory, gold or silver, but an inexpensive disposable wooden toothpick that you could buy instead of whittling yourself was unheard of. Eventually, these toothpicks found their way to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. As Henry Petroski writes in “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture,” the earliest organized manufacturers of toothpicks were the nuns of the Mondego River valley in Portugal, who made toothpicks to sell alongside the sticky confections starting in the 16th century.
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