My dad's parents did not have running water or indoor plumbing until my
parents built them a new house in 1968 or so with all the amenities. I
don't recall what my grandmother did about washing clothes, I vaguely
recall them going into town to the laundromat, I never saw her do hand
washes other than small things. I'm sure she did as your mother did
though, when the kids were all around, or made the girls do it. The new
house had a washer and dryer which my grandmother thought was a gift
from heaven.
The "bath"room was the back porch in warmer weather, with a wash basin,
wash cloth, and bar of soap, and inside in a back room when it was cold
outside (and the house was not a lot warmer, with a big oil heater in
the front room to keep the house "warm." The "little house" was out
back, which had been modernized as a large corrugated metal pipe, like
go under roads for streams to flow through, about 5ft diameter with a
door torched in it and a cone roof on top. I hauled that thing off to
the scrap yard when I sold the farm a few years ago and filled in the pit.
--R
On 4/24/15 10:39 AM, WILTON via Mercedes wrote:
'Bout time for another one:
LAUNDRY - WASH DAY
By Wilton Strickland
Mama did not have any type of washing machine until 1948, after
having been on a waiting list for two years or more because of the
shortage of household goods during and after WW II. Even then, the
machine was not fully automatic. It had only an "agitate" cycle and
had a wringer (two hard rubber rollers to squeeze water out) mounted
above the side of the tub. It was a Maytag "Square Tub" that required
filling with water by hand, bucket-by-bucket. It could be drained by
gravity using a hose mounted on the side of the tub.
After clothes had agitated, she took each piece, individually, by
hand and fed them through the wringer and into separate rinsing tubs
sitting beside the washer. Between each of two rinses, she ran them
through the wringer again. She then hung the clothes on a clothesline
in the yard to dry.
Before getting the machine, she had to do it all by hand,
including "agitating," rinsing and wringing. The only mechanical aids
were a metal washboard and a cast iron wash pot. The wash pot was
about 2½ to 3 feet in diameter, about 2 feet tall and had a rounded
bottom with three short legs cast into it. The pot sat in the back
yard, usually on three bricks or rocks to raise it slightly off the
ground. On wash day, usually Monday, Mama would fill the pot with
water often drawn from an open well by hand using a bucket on a chain
and pulley to extract it. (After 1945, we had a hand-operated pump.)
She would pour the water into another bucket and hand-carry it to the
pot and repeat the process until it was filled. She also filled at
least two, often three, wooden or galvanized steel wash tubs sitting
on a bench near the pot or under a shelter nearby. She started a fire
under and around the pot and heated the water to boiling. She put
pieces of laundry in the pot with some soap, usually homemade box-lye
soap, and boiled them several minutes.
She then took the items out of the pot and scrubbed them by hand on
a washboard in one of the tubs as necessary to remove soil and
stains. The washboard was a piece of corrugated metal about 12" by
14" mounted in a wood frame. As the item was rubbed up and down
across the small corrugations on the washboard, she would rub soap on
it as necessary, periodically dipping the item in the water in the
tub. When she felt that the item was sufficiently cleaned by the
scrubbing, she dipped the item in the scrub tub to remove excess soap,
lifted it out of the water, wrung it out (twisted) by hand to remove
excess water and dropped it into a rinse tub.
After sufficient pieces of laundry were in the rinse tub, she would
jostle them around in the tub and lift them up and down to remove more
soap and wring them out again. Sometimes, she repeated the rinse
process in a second rinse tub. After thorough rinsing and wringing,
the items were hung on a clothesline in the yard to dry. The process
(boiling, scrubbing, wringing, rinsing, wringing, rinsing, wringing,
and hanging-out) was repeated 'til the day's laundry was completed.
Many times, this took most of the day. Even then, though, it wasn't
really finished. After the laundry dried, Mama took it inside, where
she ironed most of it by hand, of course, with heavy, cast iron
"irons" heated on the wood-burning cook stove. I started ironing a lot
of my stuff at about 13.
Mama, the oldest of 16 children, mother of 8, and grandmother to
21, helped to raise her siblings and several grandchildren and raised
7 of her own children to adulthood doing all of that laundry by hand.
That's not only a lot of farmer's dirty laundry, but it's an
astounding number of dirty diapers. (This was long before disposable
diapers - Pampers. Diapers were cloth and required a lot of
washing.) At the same time, she cooked three full meals from scratch
every day and often worked in the fields, also. (The children,
especially Joyce, often helped with laundry and housework when they
were at home, of course.)
Mama did not have indoor plumbing and an automatic washer until
the summer of 1970, when my brother, Lewis, and Pete Hinton, Joyce's
husband, built a bathroom for her off the enclosed back porch, and I
provided and installed the fixtures.
Until then, we had always taken baths in a laundry tub in the
kitchen near the stove or in a bedroom. We heated the bath water in a
pot on the wood-burning cook stove. We kept a wash basin and a bucket
of water on a shelf or a table on the back porch for light washing and
for drinking. We often had to break through ice in the bucket on
cold, winter mornings.
Wilton
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