Rabbit Box Blog

There was no electricity at the Old House until long after Mom and Dad were married, so washing was done pretty much the same way it was in the nineteenth century. While the children were growing up, each was assigned a task on wash day, like carrying water or tending the fire. Mom remembers that her younger sisters were adept at stalling long enough that Harold, Jack, and Mom ended up doing most of their work.

At one time, Mom says, Grandpa Nelson bought a wringer-type washer to make wash day easier. It was powered by a gasoline engine, and he put it in the well house right next to the well so Grandma Estie could fill it straight from the well. The washer had a foot-pedal starter, “like a motorcycle,” Nelson said.

“I ain’t no motorcycle!” Estie would say. She found the washer too hard to start, and they got rid of it when they got electricity on the farm. The old dug well inside the well house had never been a good one, and Nelson had a deeper, drilled well put in just outside the kitchen, complete with an electric pump. But instead of getting an electric washing machine, Estie went back to the old way. By the time I was old enough to help a little during my visits, Estie was doing the washing by herself. This description is what I remember, supplemented with some additions and corrections by Mom.

Grandma Estie used the old kitchen to store the tin tubs, washing powders, and supplies for doing laundry, which she did the same way as long as they lived in the old house. Two cast iron wash pots sat outside the back door. Estie would carry water from the well to fill the pots.  She would then build a fire under one of the pots and heat the water until it boiled. She would scoop a little hot water from the boiling pot to the other one to warm the water in it. 

She would add washing powder and white sheets and clothes to the boiling water, then stir the load with a stick. The whites were boiled and stirred until they were acceptably clean. After washing, Estie would use the stick to move them into the rinse pot, where they would be “wrenched,” as she always said it.

Whites got treated with bluing (a weak blue dye) in the rinse water, which helped counter the orange-red tint caused by the iron-rich well water.

After the whites were taken out of the hot water, the other clothes would then go into the pot for their turn. Mom said they were not boiled. In these pre-synthetic days, almost all clothes were made of cotton, and if the water was too hot, they would fade and “draw up” (shrink) excessively. 

[By the way, wool was not very popular, only partly because it required an entirely different cleaning method. It was scratchy (pre-Merino), subject to moth-damage, and would draw up too much to wear if you weren’t careful.]

After washing and rinsing, the wash would then be moved into a tin tub filled with cool water for the final rinse, then wrung out by hand and carried to the clothesline.

The clothesline was not the typical two-strand-on-T-posts that we are used to seeing even today. Grandpa Nelson tended to be a minimalist, and besides he said he was concerned that Estie couldn’t reach a line high enough to keep the sheets off the ground. So he strung a wire between some of the apple trees on the west side of the old kitchen. He left it fairly loose so Estie could reach it easily (he said), but it hung so low that many of the clothes would drag the ground. He stapled a 1×6 board near the middle of the line, and Estie would pin the clothes to the wire, then push the board to raise the line and get the clothes off the ground. It required a fair amount of strength and balance to get everything safely supported, but Estie made it work.

I remember one of my jobs when I helped was to check the line throughout the day in case the wind had shifted and pulled the wash to the wrong side so that it dragged the ground. I would have to move the board to get the laundry airborne again.

Estie complained every wash day about not having a proper clothesline, but Nelson would just smile.

“Oh, hush, Old Woman,” he would say good-naturedly. And that would be the end of it until the next wash day.