How did people dry their laundry in the winters before dryers? I don't imagine they were putting out clothes lines in the snow
On indoor racks! Or lines. A friend of mine was live-in caretaker at a 17th-century house that still doesn't have a dryer even though people still live there, and they hung clotheslines around the kitchen from anchor hooks on the walls that were probably meant for that purpose originally (would make sense- that was just a theory but it worked so well and that WAS the warmest room in the house back then).
The Victorian house museum I work in has a little drying room attached to the laundry room, which would have been consistently hot from the boiling copper tub and the coal-heated "iron oven" used to keep the irons ready for use, and thus dryed clothing well. That was the purview of the wealthy, but professional laundresses who had the capital to invest in their setup may have had something similar, too.
