WASH DAY IN OLD KENTUCKY
We have been looking at some primary sources – certain “old” writings about life in Kentucky in a long-ago time.
Another old source to which I call your attention is Pioneer Life In Kentucky: A Series of Reminiscential Letters from Daniel Drake, M.D., to His Children, published in 1870 by Robert Clarke & Company in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Charles Daniel Drake was a physician who lived from 1811-1892. In the following excerpt, his describes wash day in old Kentucky:
“Mother's rule was to begin early and finish by noon. My additional duties were to keep up the fire, take care of the children, and assist in hanging out the clothes, which, for want of line, was often done on the fences. To bring them in at night, when they were generally frozen in winter, was still more my business. Scrubbing and scouring are generally done on Saturday, and to the former I often lent a helping hand.
“Till I went to Cincinnati to study medicine, I had never seen a scrubbing brush. We always used a split broom, in the manufacture of which I have worked many a rainy day and night. A small hickory sapling was the raw material. The ‘splits’ were stripped up for eight shorten inches with a jack-knife pressed by the right thumb, bent back, and held down with the left hand. When the heart was reached and the wood became too brittle to strip, it was cut or sawed off, and the splits turned forward and tied with a tow string made for the purpose on the spot. It only remained then to reduce the pole above to the size of a handle. A lighter and genteeler work was making V scrubs for the buckeye bowls and the good old black walnut table (bless it!) with a crack in the middle, from end to end, occasioned by the shrinking of the boards. The "-scrub" was a shorthand-broom made precisely like the scrubbing broom, but out of a smaller sapling.
“If I were not afraid you would think me boastful, I would say that when twelve years old I was decidedly dexterous in the manufacture and use of both, though I generally had rather a poor "Barlow" knife at price eighteen pence with which to execute the former. Peace to thy name, good Mr. Barlow!...
“Our most important manufacture (I mean mother's and mine) was soap-making. Father constructed the ‘ash-hopper, which was composed of clapboards, arranged in an inverted pyramid. In the bottom was thrown some husks, or straw, or dry buffalo grass, to act as a strainer. It was filled with ashes, on the broad surface on which the water was, from time to time, poured by the bucketful…. The fit was then added, and the boiling continued till the soap came.”
Reading these old accounts of life in bygone days helps us realize how easy we have things today.
