Thanks for all your responses.  I try to play what I'd consider traditional style......no chords or extra frets, mostly bagpipe tuning.  However I do use a pick which I thought might somehow technically disqualify me, but I guess I'm okay.  I've also wondered how some of Uncle Ed Thomas's customers would have played, being far more isolated then we could imagine today, and no youtube, cd's, festivals, etc.to influence them.  Like old time fiddle and banjo styles varied from county to county, but perhaps even to a greater degree. I think of "fast" when I think of today's traditional players.  Dusty Turtle had a recent thread about what fiddle tunes sounded good played slow.  Personally I think a lot of tunes sound good or even better slowed down.  With all the drones in bagpipe tuning, you get a lonesome fiddle sound when played slower, and wondered if that's how some of Uncle Ed's customers played.  I've also wondered if they learned specific tunes or as I very often do, noodled around and came up with their own tunes.  Sometimes it seems like the dulcimer is playing me rather than the other way around!  Just some rambling thoughts......

"... corset stays.. "

Typically whale bone between say 1700 and 1900.

One might imagine Viennese, or other urban European musicians, using scraps of ivory from the  shops of harpsichord builders on their zithers. 

Google sez: "..., while ancient civilizations utilized materials like turtle shell and hawkbill for instruments like the Greek lyre....

and "The earliest known string musical instrument pick—historically called a plectrum—dates back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and the Aegean Bronze Age over 4,000 years ago, where rigid picks made of materials like wood, bone, ivory, or dried leather were used to strum instruments like the Lyre and Kithara. 

updated by @wally-venable: 09/01/26 02:57:48PM

I play with leather picks all the time.  I don't buy these-- they are leather tabs cut off worn dungarees.  So, I imagine folks might've just used whatever was handy to make the sounds they wanted to make on instruments.  

I'm guessing you mean "before plastic/nylon dulcimer picks" were invented. Picks of many kinds have been used to play zitter family instruments for over a hundred years, both in America and in many other parts of the world. Including picks to play most of the mountain dulcimer's antecedent ancestors.

People might have used any number of materials as picks before plastic picks came along, and they may well have used them on early Appalachian dulcimers:
Wood picks (either flexible or rigid), bone, flexible shirt collar stays or corset stays, leather, heavy felt, rubber pieces, fiber or wire cords, basket-making reeds... you name it.  Picks do not have to be flexible. As long as it could be thin and narrow enough to hold and target individual strings, and not cut the string, it could be used. 

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Those irritated by grain of sand best avoid beach.
-Strumelia proverb c.1990

Besides turkey feathers and bare fingers, was there anything else folks might have used to play the dulcimer back before picks were invented?