Doing Laundry in the 1800s

Howdy again, everyone! Welcome to 2020. As this new year starts, I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of my eleventh title, Blacksmith Brides, a 4-in-1 novella collection coming on May 1. The other authors include Amanda Barratt, Angela K. Couch, and Pegg Thomas.

In my story, A Malleable Heart, the hard-hearted town blacksmith falls in love with the town’s laundress. While I don’t spend a great deal of time in the story in the heroine’s job of doing other people’s laundry, I did research that job to find out just what it entailed. (Can I just say that I’m THRILLED to be living in this era with my nice washing machine and dryer? LOL)

So how did one get clothes clean in the days before such “new-fangled contraptions”? 

If the families didn’t have store-bought soap available to them, they’d have to make their own. That was a long process, which started with gathering the wood ashes out of their fireplace, soaking them to get “lye water”, then rendering beef fat to get tallow. Boiling the lye and tallow together in a cast-iron pot made a liquid that could be poured into molds to create soap. Once the mixture was almost fully hardened, it would be removed from the molds and cut into bars or cakes. These would then be left in the sun to finish the hardening process. Most people would make huge batches of lye soap at once, so that they would have to go through that laborious process only a few times a year.

Most of the domestic guides seemed to recommend women do their washing on Monday. However, the process started days ahead of the actual washing.

On Saturdays, the laundry was gathered, sorted, and mended. Any rips or tears were sewn, socks darned, and the like. On Sundays, the clothing was then soaked overnight in warm water, often with a bit of soap or other cleaning agents like soda or lye.

Once Monday arrived, the real work began. Women would rise early, gather a great amount of fuel for their fire, and haul many gallons of water to fill their wash, soak, and rinse tubs. From here, they would go through the following steps:

·       Wash the clothes right side out, including applying soap and scrubbing on a washboard. Wring to get excess water out.

·       Wash the clothes inside out, including applying soap and scrubbing again on the washboard. Wring.

·       Boil the clothes and linens in soapy water, agitating them with long sticks. Wring again.

·       Rinse the clothing in fresh, clean water to remove all traces of the lye soap. Wring once more.

·       Dry on a clothesline, the nearest bush, or even laid flat in the grass.

How to keep your whites white? Try bluing!

In addition to the above steps, it was also necessary to “blue” the laundry to counteract the yellow hue that came with age, laundering, and wear. One would use a bluing agent, easily purchased in stores in the later 1800s (and still available today, just as an FYI). A bit of blue dye would be added to the water. When used properly, the amount of blue was negligible enough you wouldn’t stain your clothing blue, but it would cause the eye to see less of the yellow and, instead, see more white. What a nifty trick, right?

Some domestic guides mentioned bleaching agents as well. Ammonia worked well for flannels. Buttermilk or turpentine for cotton, and chloride of lime for muslins.

Once the washing and drying was done, the process wasn’t over. Oh, no. Then came the starching and ironing. Sometimes, the bluing stage was part of the starching process, but not always. Starch would be mixed with water, the clean, dry clothing submerged in the concoction, and then wrung out again. Once the garment was almost dry, a “sadiron” would be heated on the stove until super-hot, and then applied to the garment to remove the wrinkles. Typically, a home would have two irons so that one could be heating while the other was being used, so that no time was lost while the iron heated again.

After all this, the clothing would be neatly folded and put away.

I can’t begin to imagine how much work this would be, particularly when you factor in that many families in that day had an average of five or six children. It was no wonder why a family might hire a town laundress to do their washing, just to save the hours of backbreaking work each week.

It’s your turn: Were you aware of all the steps it took to wash clothes in the 1800s? What is the most surprising part of this process?

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has finaled and won in numerous writing competitions, and been on the ECPA best-seller list several times. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers, Women Writing the West, and is a lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, college-aged son, and four fur children.

Available Now for Pre-Order:

 

Blacksmith Brides

Hearts Are Forged by the Flames of Gentle Love in 4 Historical Stories

A Malleable Heart by Jennifer Uhlarik
(California—1870) A hard-hearted blacksmith finds acceptance with the town laundress. But when his past comes to call, will he resist love’s softening or allow God to hammer his ruined life into something of worth?

Shipwrecked On a Deserted Island? Pass the Soap!

With this Spark Historical Collection by Four Award Winning Christian Fiction Authors
Available on Amazon for $2.99

by Pam Hillman

"With this Spark" Historical Romance Collection released last week and lit a spark on Amazon! Within 48 hours it was on the Hot New Releases for historical fiction. All of us in the collection were tickled to death that readers are loving this collection so much.

I had a blast (literally!) writing Castaway with the Cowboy, my contribution to the collection. When an explosion sinks their steamship, horse wrangler Zach Holifield and nanny Abby Lindstrom find themselves stranded on a deserted island in the Caribbean. Along with Abby’s two charges, a cabin boy, and a couple of missionaries, Zach and Abby struggle for survival, normalcy, and a chance to live, to love, and to grow old together.

So, I'm happily writing along all the way to the end--which is a humdinger, btw--when my copy editor stumped me with a question...

My heroine talked about washing their clothes when they find water and the copy editor wanted to know where'd she'd get soap, since they'd barely escaped the sinking ship with their lives. What a wonderful question! And one that sent me on a quest to find out how many ways Abby could make soap on a deserted island in the Caribbean.

I was surprised to find that making soap doesn’t require some magic ingredient or special containers. Making soap isn’t as difficult as you would think. All you need is animal fat/grease—or vegetable/plant oil, water and ashes. And women in the past would have learned at an early age how to save their ashes and leach them to get lye. 

The primary ingredient is the potash or pearl ash from ashes. Pure potash can be achieved by leaching wood ashes. To do this under primitive conditions, take a small container with a small hole or holes punched through the bottom.

Wake Me Up Soap
Created by my friends at Pam & Megan's Shoppe

Union, MS

Place a one-inch layer of gravel or sand in the bottom of the container, and a one-inch layer of sand (aha, perfect for our characters stranded in the Caribbean!) on top of the gravel. The gravel and sand act as filters.

Fill the container with ashes from a cooled campfire. Place another container under the first container to catch the runoff and slowly pour about a gallon of water over the ashes allowing a brownish-gray water (the lye) to exit through the bottom into the second container.

Pour slowly. If the ashes start to “swim”, you are pouring the water too fast. During this process, if the lye coming out starts to lose its color, more ash can be added.

Next, boil the lye water until more than half of the water has evaporated. The mixture may foam, and the resulting solution is potash.

Next, add 1 ½ cup of lard, grease or animal fat to the boiling mixture and continue cooking for about 30 minutes. If using animal fat, make sure it is free from meat or food particles as the soap may spoil if during the drying process if the fat used isn’t pure.

Lovely Handmade Soap at Inn the Oaks B&B, Decatur, MS

When the desired consistency is reached, place the mixture into molds. The shape doesn’t matter: a wooden mold carved from a tree limb, a small coconut shell, seashells, anything will do. Let the mixture dry for about two days, then remove from the mold.

Once my characters managed to leach enough lye from their ashes, all they’d need to do would be to find enough animal fat or some type of oil to make their soap for washing and bathing. Goats, pigs, and sheep are sometimes found on islands, so that would be one source for animal fat.

Coconut oil (with flakes of coconut) makes excellent soap, as does the oil from eucalyptus leaves, or any vegetable oil will do. And you can also make soap from goat’s milk. I’d venture to say that soap made from goat’s milk is softer than say, something made with lard, even on a deserted island. So I can see the women preferring to bath with this softer, gentler soap.

www.candleport.com
Sweet Cotton - Wonderful Fresh Scent

When researching this post, I read that if your soap is too soft, toss in a bit of salt the next time, so that made me wonder if seawater would be a good thing or bad. So, off to google again…

Yep. You can. Just google “sea salt soap recipe”. Amazing.

Abby—and the missionary’s wife stranded along with her—probably wouldn’t have cared about adding a lot of delicate scents to their soap or how harsh or brittle it was, but I imagine with the bounty of flora and fauna found on an island, they’d want to experiment, wouldn’t they?

Can you think of scent they could add to their soap to give it a pleasing aroma? Something that would be found on an island in the Caribbean. Do you enjoy homemade soaps? If so, what’s your favorite scent?

Stealing Jake - Available Online and at a Retailer Near You!
Read the entire RT Review!

CBA Bestselling author PAM HILLMAN was born and raised on a dairy farm in Mississippi and spent her teenage years perched on the seat of a tractor raking hay. In those days, her daddy couldn't afford two cab tractors with air conditioning and a radio, so Pam drove an Allis Chalmers 110. Even when her daddy asked her if she wanted to bale hay, she told him she didn't mind raking. Raking hay doesn't take much thought so Pam spent her time working on her tan and making up stories in her head. Now, that's the kind of life every girl should dream of. www.pamhillman.com

Laundry Day

Monday Wash Day by Stephanie Grace Whitson

Have you ever purchased a book that guarantees to help you “take control of your time and life,” “manage your household,” “get organized” or “conquer the messies"? If so, you are part of a long line of homemakers seeking answers and experts offering to provide them. Remembering her own pioneer childhood, Laura Ingalls Wilder explained her mother’s household management system this way: “Each day had its own proper work. Ma used to say, wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, churn on Thursday, clean on Friday, bake on Saturday, rest on Sunday.” [from Little House in the Big Woods]

             Assigning specific chores to specific days of the week is memorialized in countless tea towels embroidered over the years. 

It can be difficult for us to understand why on earth an entire day was set aside for things we accomplish in minutes. I do laundry as an afterthought. I walk by the washer/dryer on my way to work in my home office. If there’s a load ready, I start it. As I walk by later on my way to get coffee or lunch, I transfer to the dryer and move on. Later in the day, I fold and put away. I never thought to be thankful for the orange/blue/white jugs of laundry soap perched atop the machine that saves me from staging something like the set-up at right once a week. But since I began writing about 19^th century women, that has changed.

            First, there was the set-up. “The list of utensils for the laundry includes wash boiler, wringer, washboard, washing machine, three or four tubs, two or three pails, clothes stick, dipper, and large and small clothes baskets.” Soaking overnight or for at least a few hours was recommended “to soften the dirt and loosen it by swelling the fabric.” “Rubbing” was recommended for neck, wristbands, “and other spots which are especially soiled or greasy.” Next came boiling (a first boiling and a second boiling were considered ideal), then rinsing. “It is customary to lift the clothes from the boiler directly into a tub of cold rinsing water, rinse thoroughly, wring out into a second rinsing water, and continue rinsing until all trace of soap disappears.” “After the final rinsing … articles must be wrung out, rolled in bundles, and sorted, starched pieces being placed in one basket and unstarched ones in another, and hung up to dry at once.”

            Oh, wait … starch and bluing and soap. Many women made their own. Here’s a recipe for soap found in Alice Kirk Grierson’s recipe book. Mrs. Grierson’s husband served in the Tenth Cavalry in the West between 1866 and 1888.

Soft Soap

            Fry out fourteen pounds of grease; to this add ten pounds potash dissolved in just boiling water enough to cover the lumps. In two or three days pour the mixture several pailfuls of boiling water (Be careful to use boiling water, as that cooks it). Keep on adding water as fast as the soap thickens until your barrel is full of nice, sweet soap. It must be stirred hard every time the water is put into the barrel until it is entirely mixed.

Is it any wonder women were thrilled when they could buy commercially produced soap?

A “Plan for Wash Day” published in 1908 recommended that a woman “get up at daylight and get the washing out of the way as early as possible. It is surprising how much can be accomplished early in the morning before the regular routing of the day begins.” (It’s also surprising how tired I feel just having read about doing the laundry in the “good old days.”)

In the early 1900s, a farm wife named Nellie Jones wrote, “I wish it could be burnt into the consciousness of every man and every woman that washing under average farm conditions is a man’s work, not a woman’s, measured by expenditure of strength.” I think Nellie would have loved this humorous photo produced in 1901 in response to the suffrage movement.

   

____________________________________

Best-selling, award-winning author Stephanie Grace Whitson has been writing Christian fiction since 1994, when she signed her first contract with Thomas Nelson Publishers. Since then, she's added a couple dozen titles to her list of published books, received her MA in Historical Studies from Nebraska Wesleyan University, and become a grandmother. She is a frequent guest speaker/lecturer on a variety of historical and inspirational topics for both civic organizations and church groups. Her husband and blended family, her church, historical research, antique quilts, and Kitty—her motorcycle—all rank high on her list of “favorite things.” To learn more, visit www.stephaniewhitson.com or www.Facebook.com/stephaniegracewhitson. 

__________________________________________

We're celebrating our new look with prizes to our faithful readers. Entering is simple. Just comment on this post and you will be entered to win one of MANY books and prizes--including a $50 Amazon gift card. I'm donating a copy of A Patchwork Christmas. Prizes will be awarded at the end of  September, and you can enter every day. Have fun!

a Rafflecopter giveaway