Wash Day

By Cleve Powell
Originally published for the July 2006 OAI Newsletter

For those of you who read my little history corner, I decided to rewrite a bit of my experiences in washing clothes ca. 1944 on Lone Star Road.

Summer and winter, clothes got washed on Saturday morning and it was a good four hour job that actually started the day before. The washer and dryers of today may seem like they have been around forever but they haven’t! For one thing they require running water with sufficient pressure to fill the machine and secondly you have to have enough electricity to heat up the dryer. We didn’t have either one although we did have electricity.

Everything was done in the yard! We had three big cast iron pots (wonder what happened to them) in a row that did the washing. The first thing you did in the morning was fill them up with buckets of clean water from the well. In the first one you took a bar of lye soap sometimes homemade, and whittled the whole thing down into the pot. Then you started a fire under that one with the “fat lighter” you had brought up the night before. You also lit a fire under the second pot, which was for hot water rinse. The third was for cold water rinse. The pots were about four feet apart.

When the water in the “wash” pot started to boil gently you dropped in the first bundle of clothes and someone, usually me or my mother, had to stand there and poke the clothes down under the water so they would get clean. That took a special tool, a stick or old shovel handle that had been in the wash water so much it was snow white with fuzz where the wood had started to peel. The next part I never liked because you had to lift the clothes up in the air with the stick let “em” drain for a minute and then swing them over to the next pot. They were heavy and prone to fall off the stick before they were safely above the next pot. You learned just how many pieces you could do at a time and to “bounce” them a little to make sure they weren’t going to fall. You then lifted them in and out of the hot water rinse several times and then put them in the cold water rinse.

We had a special long table outside that was under a tin roof. Beside it was a clothes wringer that you turned by hand. You would carry the clothes over to the table and set them in a pile and either wring them by hand or run them through the mechanical wringer. I remember one Saturday morning my mother was taking the first load over to the table and our trustee cat was walking ahead of her. She couldn’t see over the clothes but there was a rattlesnake under the table. She saw the cat jump straight up in the air and knew something was wrong and that probably saved her from getting bit.

Somewhere in this process there was bluing and starching. I recently read an article that Starch in those days was made from flour mixed in cold water. I remember a pan setting on the table that my mother dipped some of the clothes in which was probably some type of starch. We must have had the most solid clothes lines in town. The clothesline post were old light poles with 4×4 timbers fastened between 3 pairs of post. At first the clotheslines were rope and the clothes pins were wood no springs just a slot cut up the middle. I didn’t mind hanging out clothes because my mother sang the whole time we worked always gospel songs and I till this day remember all the songs with reverence.

Ironing: We had an ironing board in the house that was seldom used. We had one in the yard that was hinged to an oak tree and it got most of the work. My mother used flat irons (I still have a few). And they were heated in a ceramic charcoal pot and rotated as they cooled off. One unique thing I think is that we made our own charcoal by building a teepee out of blackjacks and filling it with pine straw. You then covered it with dirt except a small hole at the top and one on the bottom where you set fire to the pine straw. It would smolder for a couple of days and “voila” charcoal. This is pretty much it except to say we boiled and bleached certain types of feed sacks, out of which came the clothes I wore through the first couple of years of school at Arlington Elementary!

I’m glad I got a chance to experience these types of activities as I have an appreciation of what life was like on the early plantations.

For those of you who read my little history corner, I decided to rewrite a bit of my experiences in washing clothes ca. 1944 on Lone Star Road.

Summer and winter, clothes got washed on Saturday morning and it was a good four hour job that actually started the day before. The washer and dryers of today may seem like they have been around forever but they haven’t! For one thing they require running water with sufficient pressure to fill the machine and secondly you have to have enough electricity to heat up the dryer. We didn’t have either one although we did have electricity.

Everything was done in the yard! We had three big cast iron pots (wonder what happened to them) in a row that did the washing. The first thing you did in the morning was fill them up with buckets of clean water from the well. In the first one you took a bar of lye soap sometimes homemade, and whittled the whole thing down into the pot. Then you started a fire under that one with the “fat lighter” you had brought up the night before. You also lit a fire under the second pot, which was for hot water rinse. The third was for cold water rinse. The pots were about four feet apart.

When the water in the “wash” pot started to boil gently you dropped in the first bundle of clothes and someone, usually me or my mother, had to stand there and poke the clothes down under the water so they would get clean. That took a special tool, a stick or old shovel handle that had been in the wash water so much it was snow white with fuzz where the wood had started to peel. The next part I never liked because you had to lift the clothes up in the air with the stick let “em” drain for a minute and then swing them over to the next pot. They were heavy and prone to fall off the stick before they were safely above the next pot. You learned just how many pieces you could do at a time and to “bounce” them a little to make sure they weren’t going to fall. You then lifted them in and out of the hot water rinse several times and then put them in the cold water rinse.

We had a special long table outside that was under a tin roof. Beside it was a clothes wringer that you turned by hand. You would carry the clothes over to the table and set them in a pile and either wring them by hand or run them through the mechanical wringer. I remember one Saturday morning my mother was taking the first load over to the table and our trustee cat was walking ahead of her. She couldn’t see over the clothes but there was a rattlesnake under the table. She saw the cat jump straight up in the air and knew something was wrong and that probably saved her from getting bit.

Somewhere in this process there was bluing and starching. I recently read an article that Starch in those days was made from flour mixed in cold water. I remember a pan setting on the table that my mother dipped some of the clothes in which was probably some type of starch. We must have had the most solid clothes lines in town. The clothesline post were old light poles with 4×4 timbers fastened between 3 pairs of post. At first the clotheslines were rope and the clothes pins were wood no springs just a slot cut up the middle. I didn’t mind hanging out clothes because my mother sang the whole time we worked always gospel songs and I till this day remember all the songs with reverence.

Ironing: We had an ironing board in the house that was seldom used. We had one in the yard that was hinged to an oak tree and it got most of the work. My mother used flat irons (I still have a few). And they were heated in a ceramic charcoal pot and rotated as they cooled off. One unique thing I think is that we made our own charcoal by building a teepee out of blackjacks and filling it with pine straw. You then covered it with dirt except a small hole at the top and one on the bottom where you set fire to the pine straw. It would smolder for a couple of days and “voila” charcoal. This is pretty much it except to say we boiled and bleached certain types of feed sacks, out of which came the clothes I wore through the first couple of years of school at Arlington Elementary!

I’m glad I got a chance to experience these types of activities as I have an appreciation of what life was like on the early plantations.