The Log Cabin Living: Artifacts from 19th Century Life exhibit at Job Carr Cabin Museum encourages visitors to take a closer look at more than 20 objects in the museum's collection.
In a typical settler home during the 1800s, women and girls spent much of their time cleaning the house and doing chores. They were assigned tasks such as washing and mending clothes, making soap, collecting firewood, cooking, and cleaning. In contrast, men and boys usually tended to livestock, split firewood, repaired tools, or assisted in running the family business. During the American Civil War, the US Army employed women as laundresses and provided them with food, housing and fuel during their service.
Metal laundry basin with washboard and wringer at Job Carr Cabin Museum.
A few years later, Job's daughter Mettie moved into the log cabin with her father. She was known as an excellent hostess and housekeeper. In 1872, Jane Bradley joined the family when she married Howard Carr. In an interview, she noted that they recruited help with laundry and other chores from Puyallup women who lived nearby.
"The heavier house work and laundry was done for us by the Indian women."
~ Jane Bradley Carr
Doing the laundry was a long and arduous process that could take several days. The various steps included making soap, heating large amounts of water over a fire, scrubbing away dirt and stains, wringing out and hanging the clothing to dry, and then ironing the fabric to remove wrinkles.
Before starting the clothes washing, families often began by making their own soap. Until the mid-1800s, soap was most often homemade, using a recipe of animal fat and lye. The animal fat could be tallow from cows or sheep, or it could be lard from pork renderings. Modern soapmaking often replaces the animal fat with vegetable oil. The lye was collected with an ash hopper, which ran water through the ashes from the fireplace. After melting large amounts of fat, the lye and water were mixed in. Herbs or fragrances could also be added. Finally, the hot mixture was poured into a container or mold for the soap to solidify into a bar shape. Soap gradually became commercially available in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
A visitor to Job Carr Cabin Museum rubs a bar of soap along a wash basin during a laundry demonstration.
The next step in laundry preparation was to collect and heat a large amount of water. Without plumbing or electric water heaters, folks needed to get fresh water from a nearby stream, lake, or spring. After heating the water over a fire, the clothing was left to soak in a basin overnight.
The following day was dedicated to washing and drying the clothes. To begin, you would scrub the laundry on a washboard, one item at a time. This involved squeezing and rubbing the clothes against the metal ridges. Metal washboards were first patented in the United States in 1833.
The Fremont brand washboard, with wood clothespin and a bar of soap, in the collection of Job Carr Cabin Museum.
After scrubbing, another fire was prepared and a new batch of clean water was used to boil the laundry in a tub. Boiling the clothes also helped to kill any lice or fleas that might be hiding in the fabric. The laundry was stirred with a washing stick to agitate the clothes and prevent yellow spots from developing. The fabric was rinsed twice -- once in plain water and again in a bluing stage. The bluing involved boiling the clothes with water-tinged blue to make the yellowed cloth appear brighter white.
Visitors at Job Carr Cabin Museum operate a clothes wringer during a laundry demonstration.
After the clothes were washed, the next step was to dry them. In the 1880s, inventor Ellen Eglin designed a clothes wringero simply the process of squeezing extra water out of fabric. As a woman and an African American, she was afraid that bias would prevent her from receiving a patent. She sold her design to the American Wringer Company and it quickly became an essential laundry tool in households across the country.
The clothes wringer in the collection at Job Carr Cabin Museum is an Anchor Brand from the Lovell Manufacturing Company in Erie, Pennsylvania. The wringer had clamps at the bottom to attach it to a bucket for collecting excess water. A piece of wood called a "bench," was folded above the rubber pieces. The lower portion of wood reads, "The hold fast clamps on this wringer will fasten to patented galvanized iron, wooden or fibre tubs June 20, 1899."
The Anchor Brand clothes wringer in the artifact collection at Job Carr Cabin Museum.
Finally, after wringing out the clothes, they were hung on a line to complete the drying process. On a warm day, you could put them outside with clothes pins to keep them secure in case of a breeze. On a cool or rainy day, however, you would arrange them inside the home near a warm fire.
A volunteer at Job Carr Cabin Museum assists a visitor in using a clothespin to hang laundry on a line to dry.
The last step in processing the laundry was ironing out the wrinkles. Many modern fabrics avoid the need for this step, but in the 1800s cotton and linen garments were not wrinkle-resistant. To begin, a flat iron made of metal was heated by the fire. These were sometimes referred to as a sad iron or smoothing iron; "sad" was an old English variation on the word "solid."
One of the irons in the artifact collection at Job Carr Cabin Museum has a manufacturing label "Mrs Potts Sad Iron." This object was patented by Mary Florence Potts in 1870. They were sold in sets of 3 iron bases, plus one detachable wood handle and a cast iron stand or trivet. The innovative wooden handle stayed cool, unlike previous metal handles which had to be gripped with a thick rag or glove to avoid burns.
Each base weighed 4 to 6 pounds. Having multiple bases improved efficiency since one iron could be in use while the others reheated. Heating the iron required knowledge to judge when the iron was hot enough to be effective but not too hot to burn the fabric. Between uses, the surface of this tool had to be meticulously maintained by sandpapering and polishing, then lightly greased with beeswax to avoid rusting and allow it to glide smoothly over the cloth.
Flat irons in the collection at Job Carr Cabin Museum, including 3 metal bases (Howell Co Geneva Ill, unmarked, and Mrs Potts Sad Iron), 2 detachable wood handles, and 2 cast iron stands (unmarked crown design and JAS Smart MFG Limited Canada).
As Tacoma grew, laundry services became commercially available. Chinese immigrants moved to the area with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1873 until the Chinese expulsion in 1885. Many of them worked as domestic servants and laundry workers. The first Japanese-owned laundry in Tacoma opened in 1889 serving the growing Nihonmachi in the city's downtown core. When Croatian immigrants began to arrive in the 1890s, they opened boarding houses along the Old Town Tacoma waterfront where women were employed to do the laundry and prepare meals for local fishermen and sailors.
Cascade Steam Laundry opened in 1886 at 2124 A Street in Tacoma. By 1891, they employed 36 men and women, including a fleet of delivery drivers. Image from Tacoma Public Library, ca 1890.
Electric washing machines for home use first became available in the early 1900s, but they still relied on some manual processes until 1937. Electric steam irons also gained commercial success in the late 1930s with the introduction of the Steam-O-Matic. Electric clothes dryers did not start to become part of household appliances in the United States until the 1960s.
Tacoma resident Florence Rotondo and her daughter hang laundry on a clothesline in their backyard at 3903 S 30th St. Image from Tacoma Public Library, ca 1948.
Take a closer look at the Museum's washboard and wringer in this short video:
Sources
"The Army Laundress." National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-army-laundress.htm.
Abby. “Melvin Lovell – Complete Biography, History, and Inventions.” History-Computer, History-Computer, 25 July 2023, history-computer.com/melvin-lovell-complete-biography/.
“Housework in Late 19th Century America.” Digital History, Digital History , 2021, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_display.cfm?tcid=93.
“Laundress: Tools of the Trade.” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2022, www.nps.gov/fosc/learn/education/laundress3.htm.
Ricciardi, Em. “White Clothing and Victorian Laundry.” The Library Company of Philadelphia, The Library Company of Philadelphia, librarycompany.org/2017/08/28/white-clothing-and-victorian-laundry/#/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
About the Author
Madeline Teddy completed an internship with Job Carr Cabin Museum in Fall 2023. She was a graduate of University of British Columbia majoring in history and classical Near Eastern religious studies. She hoped to take her studies further and become a museum curator.