Laundry: The Final Frontier

As a living historian, I get more then my fair share of questions about what life was like “back in the olden days.” The vast majority of the questions I get have to do with everyday life, the most frequent being “Are you hot in that?”

A more constructive question I’m often ask is usually along the lines of “How do you clean your clothes and how often?”  When I first started to portray life in the mid 1800’s I would have replied with something like “Well with strong lye soap and a scrub board of course!”

And why would that not be true? I had seen that very thing portrayed over and over again. In movies and at local museums we’ve all seen it done.  Heck, I even did the laundry like the ladies did way back then! My local museum said that it took most of the day to do but was pretty simple. All you needed was water, a scrub board, a wringer, soap, and in no time you would be washing the wash like a real pioneer lady!

But things changed once I stopped regurgitated what I had been told and started asking questions about what I was doing.

For example, I noticed that using the scrub board “properly” on every item was extremely time consuming, used a lot of soap, and was particularity hard on the clothing. Holes quickly developed, notions were lost, and in no time my knuckles quickly went raw. Combine this with the “strong lye soap” and I was miserable!

The experience, though painful, caused me to ask questions. Did they really scrub every garment? Did laundry soap have to be lye soap? Where did they hang laundry in the winter?

Luckily dear reader, these questions led to research and to some answers that threw everything I thought I knew right out the window.

My next few blog posts will be all about the laundry. The who, what, where, when, and how’s of mid-19^th century laundry practices. We will explore equipment, stain removal, and how to put present a laundry impression that is simple yet true to the period.   

If your planning on following this blog for the next few months remember that it's important to keep an open mind. You may not agree with everything I found but maybe that will inspire you to go on your own adventure.

Remember, research is a lot like going to see the physiologist. Unless you are willing to accept and make positive changes then there is really no point in doing it.