Mary Lincoln's Fashions

[L Verge]

Years ago, Surratt House sponsored a month-long exhibit entitled Never Done about what a housewife's life was like in the 1800s. We were lucky to have a member who was an antique dealer, but also specialized in household items because she worked with our county extension service.

Just the display for washday Monday that we set up in the period kitchen was enough to give you a backache. When we researched what a typical washday consisted of - and the huge amount of weight involved with dirty laundry, wet laundry, filling at least two or three washtubs, boiling water, making starch, bluing the whites, hanging on lines to dry, etc. - we all went home and kissed our electric appliances!

One source that was quoted in our little booklet that accompanied the exhibit was a statement made by a young lady from Old Salem, NC: "As I watch Sister McAnully and Sister Hall do the laundry, I make some elementary calculations. If it takes seven buckets of water to fill the kettle in which four batches of scrubbed laundry are boiled, if each of the four batches must be rinsed four times, if each rinse takes two buckets of water, and if each bucket of water weighs twenty-five pounds, how much water must the sisters haul before the job is done? The answer: nine hundred seventy-five pounds. That is not to mention the wood they must carry into the washhouse for the fire under the kettle, or the wooden tubs full of wet laundry that they carry from the kettle to the bench in the yard when the rinsing is done, or the rinsed laundry that they take to the clothesline and hang up."

Washing the cotton lace (Nottingham lace) curtains that were in vogue in the mid-1800s also required special drying techniques. Once washed, blued, and starched, the curtains were taken to an inside, unoccupied room and placed on sheets, where they were pinned down at intervals of 2-3 inches -- kinda hard on the knees. Some women rigged up their quilting frames with pegs and hooks so that five or six panels could be laid to dry on top of each other. This led to the invention of the curtain stretcher, which some of you may remember your mothers using up until the mid-1900s. Those are killers on the fingers, and you may end up bleeding on your clean curtains!

When it came to ironing, there were various sizes and weights depending on the type of material being ironed. At least two to five irons were used at one session, with at least one heating while one is being used. The average weight of the irons was six pounds. An iron could be used for about five minutes before it needed to be replaced. So much for the good old days when it comes to labor...