Laundry and Soap Making

Our lifestyle was derived from tradition passed down for generations. We never owned a washing machine. The clothes were washed once a week on tub and board by hand. The water was carried up the hill from grandma's spring, two buckets per person. It was a day's work.

Clothes were hung on lines to dry outside by sun and wind. Sometimes it rained on them, maybe overnight. If we needed something dried faster, we had a wire stretched behind the wood-burning stove. That is where we hung up socks and diapers for fast drying. Sometimes the diapers were just dried and reused if they were only wet. This did not smell too good.

We used homemade lye soap to wash with and boiled the white clothes in a big black kettle on an open fire to sterilize them.

Once the clothes were clean, it took another day for ironing them. We divided them out, ironing our own plus one small child's and one brother's. Men did not do this kind of work. This was counted "women's work." Two of us ironed on the big dining table. We had two flat irons, and we would borrow my grandma's two. We heated them on the cooking range. While we used one, the other one heated. It was very hot work in the summer because, of course, we had no fans or air conditioners in those days.

My mamma made all of the lye soap in the same big black kettle that we used for washing clothes outside. She built up a big fire under it and added scrap meat and fat mixed with the right amount of water and lye. After it cooked for several hours, it was tested with a long chicken tail feather. When the soap skinned the feather off to the quill, the soap was read to pour in pans to cool. Then it was cut in big blocks for drying.

We used lye soap for all cleaning, all laundry, hand washing, and even for shampoo. It made the hair ever so soft in rainwater, but it was strong on the skin, especially in the dishpan.