FIRESIDE INDUSTRIES.
Around the great glowing fireplace in an old New England kitchen
centred the homeliness and picturesqueness of an old-time home. The
walls and floor were bare; the furniture was often meagre, plain, and
comfortless; the windows were small and ill-fitting; the whole house
was draughty and cold; but in the kitchen glowed a beneficent heart
that spread warmth and cheer and welcome, and beauty also when
the old rude-furnished room
Burst flower-like into rosy bloom.
The settlers builded great chimneys with ample open hearths, and to
those hearths the vast forests supplied plentiful fuel; but as the
forests disappeared in the vicinity of the towns, the fireplaces also
shrank in size, so that in Franklin’s day he could write of the big
chimneys as “the fireplaces of our fathers;” and his inventions for
economizing fuel had begun to be regarded as necessities.
The kitchen was the housewife’s domain, the chimney-seat her throne;
but the furniture of that throne and the sceptre were far different
from the kitchen furnishings of to-day.
We often see fireplaces with hanging cranes in pictures illustrating
earliest colonial times, but the crane was unknown in those days. When
the seventeenth-century chimney was built, ledges were left on either
side, and on them rested the ends of a long heavy pole of green wood,
called a lug-pole or back bar. The derivation of the word lug-pole is
often given as meaning from lug to lug, as the chimney-side was often
called the lug. Whittier wrote:--
And for him who sat by the chimney lug.
Others give it from the old English word _lug_, to carry; for it was
indeed the carrying-pole. It was placed high up in the yawning chimney,
with the thought and intent of its being out of reach of the devouring
flames, and from it hung a motley collection of hooks of various
lengths and weights, sometimes with long rods, sometimes with chains,
and rejoicing in various names. Pot-hooks, pot-hangers, pot-hangles,
pot-claws, pot-cleps, were one and the same; so also were trammels and
crooks. Gib and gibcroke were other titles. Hake was of course the old
English for hook:--
On went the boilers till the hake
Had much ado to bear ’em.
A twi-crook was a double hook.
Other terms were gallow-balke, for the lug-pole, and gallow-crookes for
pot-hooks. These were Yorkshire words, used alike in that county by
common folk and gentry. They appear in the inventory of the goods of
Sir Timothy Hutton, and in the farming-book of Henry Best, both dating
to the time of settlement of New England. A recon was another Yorkshire
name for a chain with pot-hooks. They were heard but rarely in New
England.
The “eetch-hooke” named by Thomas Angell, of Providence, in 1694, with
his “tramils and pot hookes” is an unknown and undescribable form of
trammel to me, possibly an H-hook.
By these vari-named hooks were suspended at various heights over the
flames pots, kettles, and other bailed cooking utensils.
The lug-pole, though made of green wood, often became brittle or
charred through too long and careless use over the hot fire, and was
left in the chimney till it broke under its weighty burden of food and
metal. And as within the chimney corner was a favorite seat for both
old and young of the household, not only were precious cooking utensils
endangered and food lost, but human life as well, as told in Judge
Sewall’s diary, and in other diaries and letters of the times. So, when
the iron crane was hung in the fireplace, it not only added grace and
convenience to the family hearth, but safety as well. On it still were
hung the pot-hooks and trammels, but with shortened arms or hangers.
The mantel was sometimes called by the old English name, clavy or
clavel-piece. In one of John Wynter’s letters, written in 1634, he
describes his new home in Maine:
The chimney is large, with an oven in each end of him: he is so large
that we can place our Cyttle within the Clavell-piece. We can brew
and bake and boyl our Cyttle all at once in him.
The change in methods of cooking is plainly evinced in many of our
common kitchen utensils. In olden times the pots and kettles always
stood on legs, and all skillets and frying-pans and saucepans stood
on slender legs, that, if desired, they might be placed with their
contents over small beds of coals raked to one side of the hearth. A
further convenience to assist this standing over coals was a little
trivet, a tripod or three-footed stand, usually but a simple skeleton
frame on which the skillet could be placed. In the corner of a
fireplace would be seen trivets with legs of various lengths, through
which the desired amount of heat could be obtained. We read in Eden’s
_First Books on America_:--
He shulde fynde in one place a fryingpan, in another chauldron, here a
tryvet, there a spytte, and these in kynde in every pore mans house:--
Of somewhat later date was the toast rack, also standing on its little
spindling legs.
No better list can be given of the kitchen utensils of earliest
colonial days in America than those found in the inventories of the
estates of the dead immigrants. These inventories are, in some cases,
still preserved in the Colonial Court Records. We find that Madam
Olmstead, of Hartford, Conn., had, in 1640, in her kitchen:--
2 Brasse Skillets 1 Ladle 1 candlestick
one mortar all of brasse 1 brasse pott 5.
7 Small peuter dishes 1 peuter bason 6
porringers 2 peuter candlesticks 1
frudishe 2 little sasers 1 smale plate. 1. 10.
7 biger peuter dishes 1 salt 2 peuter
cupps 1 peuter dram 1 peuter bottel
1 Warmeing pan 13 peuter spoons 2. 12.
1 Stupan 3 bowles & a tunnel 7 dishes
10 spoones one Wooddin cupp 1
Wooddin platter with three old latten
panns Two dozen and a halfe trenchers
two wyer candlesticks 11.
2 Jacks 2 Bottels 2 drinking hornes 1
little pott 10.
2 beare hogsheads 2 beare barrels 2
powdering tubs 4 brueing vessels 1
cowle 2 firkins 2.
This was certainly a very good outfit. The utensils for the manufacture
and storage of beer did not probably stand in the kitchen, but in
the lean-to or brew-house. A “cowl” was a large tub with ears; in it
liquids could be carried by two persons, who bore the ends of a pole
thrust through the ears or handles. Often with the cowl was specified
a pail with iron bail. William Harris, of Pawtuxet, R. I., had, in
1681, “two Payles and one jron Bayle” worth three shillings. This
naming of the pail-bail marked the change in the form of pail handles;
originally, pails were carried by sticks thrust through ears on either
side of the vessel.
The jacks were waxed leather jugs or drinking horns, much used in
English alehouses in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose use
gave rise to the singular notion of the French that Englishmen drank
their ale out of their boots. Governor Winthrop had jacks and leather
bottles; but both names disappear from inventories by the year 1700, in
New England.
These leather bottles were in universal use in England “among shepherds
and harvest-people in the countrey.” They were also called bombards.
Their praises were sung in a very spirited ballad, of which I give a
few lines:--
I wish in heaven his soul may dwell
Who first found out the leather bottell.
A leather bottell we know is good
Far better than glasses or cases of wood,
For when a mans at work in a field
Your glasses and pots no comfort will yield,
But a good leather bottell standing by
Will raise his spirits whenever he’s dry.
* * * * *
And when the bottell at last grows old,
And will good liquor no longer hold,
Out of the side you may make a clout
To mend your shoes when they’re worn out,
Or take and hang it up on a pin
’Twill serve to put hinges and odd things in.
Latten-ware was a kind of brass. It may be noted that no tin appears on
this list, nor in many of the inventories of these early Connecticut
colonists. Thomas Hooker had several “tynnen covers.”
Brass utensils were far from cheap. Handsome brass mortars were
expensive. Brass kettles were worth three pounds apiece. No wonder
the Indians wished their brass kettles buried with them as their
most precious possessions. The brass utensils of William Whiting, of
Hartford, in 1649, were worth twenty pounds; Thomas Hooker’s, about
fifteen pounds. Among other utensils named in the inventories of some
neighbors of Mr. Hooker were an “iron to make Wafer cakes,” “dyitt
vessels,” “shredin knife,” “flesh fork.” Robert Day had a “brass
chaffin dish, 3s, lether bottle 2s, brass posnet 4s, brass pott 6s,
brass kettle 2. 10s.” A chafing-dish in olden times was an open box of
wire into which coals were thrust.
Dame Huit, of Windsor, Conn., had these articles, among others:--
1 Cullender 2 Pudding pans. In kitchen
in brasse & Iron potts, ladles, skimmers,
dripping pans, posnets, and
other pans 6. 10s.
A pair Andirons 2 Brandii 2 Pair Crooks
3 pair of tonges and Iron Spitts pot-hangers 1.
1 Fornace 2.
Tubbs pales churnes butter barrels &
other woodin implements 2.
The “two Brandii” were brand-irons or brond-yrons, a kind of trivet
or support to set on the andirons. Sometimes they held brands or logs
in place, or upon them dishes could be placed. Toasting-irons and
broiling-irons are named. “Scieufes,” or sieves, were worth a shilling
apiece.
Eleazer Lusher, of Dedham, Mass., in 1672, owned cob-irons, trammels,
firepans, gridirons, toasting-fork, salt pan, brand pan, mortar,
pestle, box iron heaters, kettles, skillets, spits, frying-pan, ladles,
skimmers, chafing-dishes, pots, pot-hooks, and creepers.
The name creeper brings to our consideration one of the homeliest
charms of the fireplace--the andirons. Creepers were the lower and
smaller andirons placed between the great firedogs. The word is also
applied to a low cooking spider, which could be pushed in among the
embers. Cob-irons were the simplest form of andirons, and usually were
used merely to support the spit; sometimes they had hooks to hold a
dripping-pan under the spit. Sometimes a fireplace showed three pairs
of andirons, on which logs could be laid at various heights. Sometimes
a single pair of andirons had three sets of hooks or branches for the
same purpose. They were made of iron, copper, steel, or brass, often
cast in a handsome design. The andirons played an important part in the
construction and preservation of a fire.
And the construction of one of these great fires was no light or
careless matter. Whittier, in his _Snow-Bound_, thus tells of the
making of the fire in his home:--
We piled with care our nightly stack
Of wood against the chimney-back,--
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
And on its top the stout back-stick;
The knotty forestick laid apart,
And filled between with curious art
The ragged brush; then hovering near
We watched the first red blaze appear.
Often the great backlog had to be rolled in with handspikes, sometimes
drawn in by a chain and yoke of oxen. The making of the fire and
its preservation from day to day were of equal importance. The
covering of the brands at night was one of the domestic duties, whose
non-fulfillment in those matchless days often rendered necessary a
journey with fire shovel to the house of the nearest neighbor to obtain
glowing coals to start again the kitchen fire.
A domestic luxury seen in well-to-do homes was a tin kitchen, a
box-like arrangement open on one side, which was set next the blaze.
It stood on four legs. In it bread was baked or _roasted_. Through the
kitchen passed a spit, which could be turned by an external handle; on
it meat was spitted to be roasted.
The brick oven was not used so frequently, usually but once a week.
This was a permanent furnishing. When the great chimney was built, a
solid heap of stones was placed for its foundation, and a vast and
massive structure was reared upon it. On one side of the kitchen
fireplace, but really a part of the chimney whole, was an oven which
opened at one side into the chimney, and below an ash pit with swinging
iron doors with a damper. To heat this oven a great fire of dry wood
was kindled within it, and kept burning fiercely for some hours. Then
the coal and ashes were removed, the chimney draught and damper were
closed, and the food to be cooked was placed in the heated oven. Great
pans of brown bread, pots of pork and beans, an Indian pudding, a dozen
pies, all went into the fiery furnace together.
On Thanksgiving week the great oven was heated night and morning
for several days. To place edibles at the rear of the glowing oven,
it is plain some kind of a shovel must be used; and an abnormally
long-handled one was universally found by the oven-side. It was called
a slice or peel, or fire-peel or bread-peel. Such an emblem was it of
domestic utility and unity that a peel and a strong pair of tongs were
a universal and luck-bearing gift to a bride. A good iron peel and
tongs cost about a dollar and a half. The name occurs constantly in old
wills among kitchen properties. We read of “the oven, the mawkin, the
bavin, the peel.” Sometimes, when the oven was heated, the peel was
besprinkled with meal, and great heaps of rye and Indian dough were
placed thereon, and by a dextrous and indescribable twist thrown upon
cabbage leaves on the oven-bottom, and thus baked in a haycock shape.
“Shepherd Tom” Hazard, in his inimitable _Jonny Cake Papers_, thus
speaks of the old-time methods of baking:--
Rhineinjun bread, vulgarly called nowadays rye and Indian bread, in
the olden time was always made of one quart of unbolted Rhode Island
rye meal to two quarts of the coarser grained parts of Ambrosia
(Narragansett corn meal) well kneaded and made into large round loaves
of the size of a half-peck measure. There are two ways of baking
it. One way was to fill two large iron basins with the kneaded dough
and, late in the evening, when the logs were well burned down, to
clear a place in the middle of the fire and place the two basins of
bread, one on top of the other, so as to inclose their contents and
press them into one loaf. The whole was then carefully covered with
hot ashes, with coals on top, and left until morning. Another way
was to place a number of loaves in iron basins in a long-heated and
well-tempered brick oven--stone would not answer as the heat is too
brittle--into which a cup of water was also placed to make the crust
soft. The difference between brown bread baked in this way, with its
thick, soft, sweet crust, from that baked in the oven of an iron stove
I leave to abler pens than mine to portray.
In friendly chimney corners there stood a jovial companion of the peel
and tongs, the flip iron, or loggerhead, or flip-dog, or hottle. Lowell
wrote:--
Where dozed a fire of beechen logs that bred
Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,
And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by nice instinct, creamed the bowl of flip.
Flip was a drink of vast popularity, and I believe of potent benefit
in those days when fierce winters and cold houses made hot drinks more
necessary to the preservation of health than nowadays. I have drunk
flip, but, like many a much-vaunted luxury of the olden time, I prefer
to read of it. It is indescribably burnt and bitter in flavor.
It may be noted in nearly all old inventories that a warming-pan is
a part of the kitchen furnishing. Wood wrote in 1634 of exportation
to the New England colony, “Warming pannes & stewing pannes are of
necessary use and very good traffick there.” One was invoiced in 1642
at 3_s._ 6_d._, another in 1654 at 5_s._ A warming-pan was a shallow
pan of metal, usually brass or iron, about a foot in diameter and
three or four inches deep, with a pierced brass or copper cover. It
was fitted with a long wooden handle. When used, it was filled with
coals, and when thoroughly heated, was thrust between the icy sheets
of the bed, and moved up and down to give warmth to every corner. Its
fireside neighbor was the footstove, a box of perforated metal in a
wooden frame, within which hot coals could be placed to warm the feet
of the goodwife during a long winter’s drive, or to render endurable
the arctic atmosphere of the unheated churches. Often a lantern of
pierced metal hung near the warming-pan. The old-time lanterns, still
occasionally found in New England kitchens or barns, form a most
interesting study for the antiquary, and a much neglected fad for the
collector. I have one of Elizabethan shape, to which, when I found it,
fragments of thin sheets of horn still clung--the remains of the horn
slides which originally were enclosed in the metal frame.
High up on the heavy beam over the fireplace stood usually a
candlestick, an old lamp, perhaps a sausage stuffer, or a spice-mill,
or a candle mold, a couple of wooden noggins, sometimes a pipe-tongs.
By the side of the fireplace hung the soot-blackened, smoke-dried
almanac, and near it often hung a betty-lamp, whose ill-smelling flame
could supply for conning the pages a closer though scarce brighter
light than the flickering hearth flame.
By the hearth, sometimes in the chimney corner, stood the high-backed
settle, a sheltered seat, while the family dye-pot often was used by
the children as a chimney bench.
Many household utensils once in common use in New England are now
nearly obsolete. In many cases the old-time names are disused and
forgotten, while the object itself may still be found with some modern
appellation. In reading old wills, inventories, and enrollments, and
the advertisements in old newspapers, I have made many notes of these
old names, and have sometimes succeeded, though with difficulty, in
identifying the utensils thus designated. Of course the different
English shire dialects supply a variety of local names. In some cases
good old English words have been retained in constant use in New
England, while wholly archaic in the fatherland.
In every thrifty New England home there stood a tub containing a pickle
for salting meat. It was called a powdering-tub, or powdering-trough.
This use of the word “powder” for salt dates even before Shakespeare’s
day.
Grains is an obsolete word for tines or prongs. Winthrop wrote in 1643
that a snake crawled in the Assembly room, and a parson “held it with
his foot and staff with a small pair of grains and killed it.”
Spenser used the word “flasket” thus: “In which to gather flowers to
fill their flasket.” It was a basket, or hamper, made of woven wicker.
John Hull, writing in 1675, asks that “Wikker Flasketts” be brought to
him on the _Sea Flower_.
A skeel was a small, shallow wooden tub, principally used for holding
milk to stand for cream. It sometimes had one handle. The word is
now used in Yorkshire. Akin to it is the word keeler, a small wooden
tub, which is still constantly heard in New England, especially in
application to a tub in which dishes are washed. Originally, cedar
keelers were made to hold milk, and a losset was also a large flat
wooden dish used for the same purpose. A skippet was a vessel much
like a dipper, small and round, with long handle, and used for ladling
liquids.
A quarn was a hand-mill for grinding meal, and sometimes it stood in
a room by itself. It was a step in domestic progress beyond pounding
grain with a pestle in a mortar, and was of earlier date than the
windmill or water-mill. In Wiclif’s translation we read in Matthew
xxiv: “Two wymmen schalen be gryndynge in quern,” etc. This word is
also used by Shakespeare in _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In early New
England wills the word is found, as in one of 1671: “1 paire Quarnes
and Lumber in the quarne house, 10s.” It was sometimes spelled “cairn,”
as in a Windham will, and also “quern” and “quirn.”
Sometimes a most puzzling term will be found in one of these old
inventories, one which appears absolutely incomprehensible. Here is
one which seems like a riddle of which the answer is irrevocably
lost: “One Billy bassha Pan.” It is found in the kitchen list of the
rich possessions of Madam De Peyster, in 1774, which inventory is
preserved in the family archives at the Van Cortlandt Manor House, at
Croton-on-Hudson. You can give any answer you please to the riddle; but
my answer is this, in slightly altered verse. I think that Madam De
Peyster’s cook used that dish to serve:--
A sort of soup or broth or stew
Or hotchpot of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo,
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace;
All these were cooked in the Manor kitchen,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
The early settlers were largely indebted to various forest trees for
cheap, available, and utilizable material for the manufacture of both
kitchen utensils and tableware. Wood-turning was for many years a
recognized trade; dish-turner a business title. We find Lion Gardiner
writing to John Winthrop, Jr., in 1652, “My wyfe desireth Mistress
Lake to get her a dozen of trays for shee hearith that there is a good
tray-maker with you.”
Governor Bradford found the Indians using wooden bowls, trays, and
dishes, and the “Indian bowls,” made from the knots of maple-trees,
were much sought after by housekeepers till this century. A fine
specimen of these bowls is now in the Massachusetts Historical Society.
It was originally taken from the wigwam of King Philip. Wooden noggins
(low bowls with handles) are constantly named in early inventories,
and Mary Ring, of Plymouth, thought, in 1633, that a “wodden cupp” was
valuable enough to leave by will as a token of friendship. Wooden
trenchers, also made by hand, were used on the table for more than a
century, and were universally bequeathed by will, as by that of Miles
Standish. White poplar wood made specially handsome dishes. Wooden pans
were made in which to set milk. Wooden bread troughs were used in every
home. These were oblong, trencher-shaped bowls, about a foot and a half
in length, hollowed and shaped by hand from a log of wood. Across the
trough ran lengthwise a stick or rod, on which the flour was sifted in
a temse, or searce, or sieve. The saying, “set the Thames on fire,” is
said to have been originally “set the temse on fire,” meaning that hard
labor would, by the friction of constant turning, set the wooden temse,
or sieve, on fire.
It was not necessary to apply to the wood-turner to manufacture these
simply shaped dishes. Every winter the men and boys of the household
manufactured every kind of domestic utensils and portions of farm
implements that could be whittled or made from wood with simple tools.
By the cheerful kitchen fireside much of this work was done. Indeed,
the winter picture of the fireside should always show the figure of a
whittling boy. They made butter paddles of red cherry, salt mortars,
pig troughs, pokes, sled neaps, ax helves, which were sawn, whittled,
and carefully scraped with glass; box traps and “figure 4” traps,
noggins, keelers, rundlets, flails, cheese-hoops, cheese-ladders,
stanchions, handles for all kinds of farm implements, and niddy-noddys.
Strange to say, the latter word is not found in any of our
dictionaries, though the word is as well known in country vernacular as
the article itself--a hand-reel--or as the old riddle:--
Niddy-noddy,
Two heads and one body.
There were still other wooden vessels. In his _Philocothonista, or The
Drunkard Opened, Dissected and Anatomized_ (1635), Thomas Heywood,
gives for “carouseing-bowles of wood” these names: “mazers, noggins,
whiskins, piggins, cruizes, wassel-bowles, ale-bowles, court-dishes,
tankards, kannes.”
There were many ways of usefully employing the winter evening hours.
Some thrifty folk a hundred years ago occupied spare time in sticking
card-teeth in wool-cards. The strips of pierced leather and the
wire teeth bent in proper shape were supplied to them by the card
manufacturer. The long leather strips and boxes filled with the bent
wire teeth might be seen standing in many a country home, and many an
evening by the light of the blazing fire,--for the work required little
eyesight or dexterity,--sat the children on dye-pot, crickets, and logs
of wood, earning a scant sum to add to their “broom-money.”
By the side of the chimney, in New England country houses, always
hung a broom or besom of peeled birch. These birch brooms were
a characteristic New England production. To make one a straight
birch-tree from three to four inches in diameter was chosen, and
about five feet of the trunk was cut off. Ten inches from the larger
end a notch was cut around the stick, and the bark peeled off from
thence to the end. Then with a sharp knife the bared end was carefully
split up to the notch in slender slivers, which were held back by the
broom-maker’s left hand until they became too many and too bulky to
restrain, when they were tied back with a string. As the tendency of
the slivers or splints was to grow slightly thinner toward the notch,
there was left in the heart of the growing broom a short core, which
had to be whittled off. When this was done the splints were all turned
back to their first and natural position, a second notch was cut an
inch above the first one, leaving a strip of bark an inch in diameter;
the bark was peeled off from what was destined to be the broom handle,
and a series of splints was shaved down toward the second notch. Enough
of the stick was left to form the handle; this was carefully whittled
until an inch or so in diameter, was smoothed, and furnished with a
hole in the end in which to place a string or a strip of leather for
suspension. The second series of splints from the handle end was firmly
turned down and tied with hempen twine over the wholly splintered end,
and all the splints cut off the same length. The inch of bark which
remained of the original tree helped to hold the broom-splints firmly
in place.
When these brooms were partly worn, the restraining string could be
removed, and the flaring splints formed an ideal oven-besom, spreading
and cleaning the ashes from every corner and crevice. Corn brooms were
unknown in these country neighborhoods until about the middle of the
present century.
A century, and even as late as half a century ago, many a farmer’s
son (and daughter too) throughout New England earned his or her first
spending-money by making birch brooms for the country stores, from
whence they were sent to the large cities, especially Boston, where
there was a constant demand for them. In Northampton, about 1790, one
shopkeeper kept as many as seven or eight hundred of these brooms on
hand at one time.
The boys and girls did not grow rich very fast at broom-making.
Throughout Vermont, fifty years ago, the uniform price paid to the
maker for these brooms was but six cents apiece, and as he had to work
at least three evenings to make one broom,--to say nothing of the
time spent in selecting and cutting the birch-tree,--it was not so
profitable an industry as gathering beech-nuts at a dollar a bushel.
Major Robert Randolph told in fashionable London circles, that about
the year 1750, he carried many a load of these birch brooms on his
back ten miles to Concord, that he might thus earn a few shillings.
Such brooms were known by different names in different localities:
birch brooms, splinter brooms, and Indian brooms. The Indians were
very proficient in making them, and it is said invented them. This can
readily be believed, for like birch-bark canoes and snowshoes, they
are examples of perfection in utility and in the employment of native
materials. Squaws wandered over certain portions of the country bearing
brooms on their backs, peddling them from house to house for ninepence
apiece and a drink of cider. In 1806, one minister of Haverhill, New
Hampshire, had two of these brooms given to him as a marriage fee. When
a Hadley man planted broom corn in 1797, and made corn brooms to sell,
he was scornfully met with the remark that broom-making was work for
Indians and boys. It was long ere his industry crowded out the sturdy
birch brooms.
There were many domestic duties which did not waft sweet “odors of
Araby;” the annual spring manufacture of soft soap for home consumption
was one of them, and also one of the most important and most trying
of all the household industries. The refuse grease from the family
cooking was stowed away in tubs and barrels through the cool winter
months in unsavory masses, and the wood-ashes from the great fireplaces
were also thriftily stored until the carefully chosen time arrived. The
day was selected with much deliberation, after close consultation with
that family counselor, the almanac, for the moon must be in the right
quarter, and the tide at the flood, if the soap were to “come right.”
Then the leach was set outside the kitchen door. Some families owned
a strongly made leach-tub, some used a barrel, others cut a section
from a great birch-tree, and removed the bark to form a tub, which
was placed loosely in a circular groove in a base made of wood or,
preferably, of stone. This was not set horizontally, but was slightly
inclined. The tub was filled with ashes, and water was scantily poured
in until the lye trickled or leached out of an outlet cut in the groove
at the base. The “first run” of lye was not strong enough to be of use,
and was poured again upon the ashes. The wasted ashes were replenished
again and again, and water poured in small quantities on them, and
the lye accumulated in a receptacle placed for it. It was a universal
test that when the lye was strong enough to hold up an egg, it was also
strong enough to use for the soap boiling. In the largest iron pot the
grease and lye were boiled together, often over a great fire built
in the open air. The leached ashes were not deemed refuse and waste;
they were used by the farmer as a fertilizer. Soap made in this way,
while rank and strong, is so pure and clean that it seems almost like a
jelly, and shows no trace of the vile grease that helped to form it.
The dancing firelight shone out on no busier scene than on the grand
candle-dipping. It had taken weeks to prepare for this domestic
industry, which was the great household event of the late autumn, as
soap-making was of the spring. Tallow had been carefully saved from the
domestic animals killed on the farm, the honeyed store of the patient
bee had been robbed of wax to furnish materials, and there was still
another source of supply.
The summer air of the coast of New England still is sweet with one
of the freshest, purest plant-perfumes in the world--the scent of
bayberry. These dense woody shrubs bear profusely a tiny, spicy,
wax-coated berry; and the earliest colonists quickly learned that from
this plentiful berry could be obtained an inflammable wax, which would
replace and supplement any lack of tallow. The name so universally
applied to the plant--candleberry--commemorates its employment for this
purpose. I never pass the clumps of bayberry bushes in the early autumn
without eagerly picking and crushing the perfumed leaves and berries;
and the clean, fresh scent seems to awaken a dim recollection,--a
hereditary memory,--and I see, as in a vision, the sober little
children of the Puritans standing in the clear glowing sunlight, and
faithfully stripping from the gnarled bushes the waxy candleberries;
not only affording through this occupation material assistance to
the household supplies, but finding therein health, and I am sure
happiness, if they loved the bayberries as I, their descendant, do.
The method of preparing this wax was simple; it still exists in a few
Plymouth County households. The berries are simply boiled with hot
water in a kettle, and the resolved wax skimmed off the top, refined,
and permitted to harden into cakes or candles. The references in
old-time records to this bayberry wax are too numerous to be recounted.
A Virginian governor, Robert Beverley (for the bayberry and its wax
was known also in the South as myrtleberry wax), gave, perhaps, the
clearest description of it:--
A pale green brittle wax of a curious green color, which by refining
becomes almost transparent. Of this they made candles which are never
greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the hottest weather;
neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a
tallow candle; but instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts
a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the
room; insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have
the incense of the expiring snuff.
It is true that the balmy breath of the bayberry is exhaled even on its
funeral pyre. A bayberry candle burns like incense; and I always think
of its perfume as truly the incense to the household hearth-gods of an
old New England home.
Bayberry wax was a standard farm-product, a staple article of traffic,
till this century, and it was constantly advertised in the newspapers.
As early as 1712, Thomas Lechmere wrote to John Winthrop, Jr.:--
I am now to beg one favour of you, that you secure for me all the
bayberry wax you can possibly lay yor hands on. What charge you shall
be at securing it shall be thankfully paid you. You must take a care
that they do not putt too much tallow among it, being a custome and
cheate they have gott.
When the candle-dipping began, a fierce fire was built in the
fireplace, and over it was hung the largest house kettle, half filled
with water and melted tallow, or wax. Candle-rods were brought down
from the attic, or pulled out from under the edge of beams, and placed
about a foot and a half apart, reaching from chair to chair.
Boards were placed underneath to save the spotless floor from greasy
drippings. Across these rods were laid, like the rounds of a ladder,
shorter sticks or reeds to which the wicks were attached at intervals
of a few inches. The wicks of loosely spun cotton or tow were dipped
time and time again into the melted tallow, and left to harden between
each dipping. Of course, if the end of the kitchen (where stood the
rods and hung the wicks) were very cold, the candles grew quickly,
since they hardened quickly; but they were then more apt to crack.
When they were of proper size, they were cut off, spread in a sunny
place in the garret to bleach, and finally stored away in candle-boxes.
Sometimes the tallow was poured into molds; when, of course,
comparatively few candles could be made in a day. In some communities
itinerant candle-makers carried molds from house to house, and assisted
in the candle manufacture.
These candles were placed in candlesticks, or in large rooms were
set in rude chandeliers of strips of metal with sockets, called
candle-beams. Handsome rooms had sconces, and the kitchen often had
a sliding stand by which the candle could be adjusted at a desired
height. Snuffers were as indispensable as candlesticks, and were
sometimes called snuffing-iron, or snit--a word not in the _Century
Dictionary_--from the old English verb, “snyten,” to blow out. The
snuffers lay in a little tray called a snuffer-tray, snuffer-dish,
snuffer-boat, snuffer-slice, or snuffer-pan. Save-alls, a little
wire frame to hold up the last burning end of candle, were another
contrivance of our frugal ancestors.
In no way was a thrifty housewife better known than through her
abundant stock of symmetrical candles; and nowhere was a skilful and
dextrous hand more needed than in shaping them. Still, candles were
not very costly if the careless housewife chose to purchase them. The
_Boston Evening Post_ of October 5, 1767, has this advertisement:
“Dip’d Tallow Candles Half a Pistareen the single Pound & Cheaper by
Cwt.”
In many a country household some old-time frugalities linger, but the
bounteous oil-wells of Pennsylvania have rendered candles not only
obsolete, but too costly for country use, and by a turn of fashion they
have become comparatively an article of luxury, but still seem to throw
an old-time refinement wherever their soft rays shine.
An account of housewifely duties in my great-grandmother’s home was
thus written, in halting rhyme, by one of her sons when he too was
old:--
The boys dressed the flax, the girls spun the tow,
The music of mother’s footwheel was not slow.
The flax on the bended pine distaff was spread,
With squash shell of water to moisten the thread.
Such were the pianos our mothers did keep
Which they played on while spinning their children to sleep.
My mother I’m sure must have borne off the medal,
For she always was placing her foot on the pedal.
The warp and the filling were piled in the room,
Till the web was completed and fit for the loom,
Then labor was pleasure, and industry smiled,
And the wheel and the loom every trouble beguiled,
And there at the distaff the good wives were made.
Thus Solomon’s precepts were fully obeyed.
The manufacture of the farm-reared wool was not so burdensome and
tedious a process as that of flax, but it was far from pleasant. The
fleeces of wool had to be opened out and cleaned of all sticks, burrs,
leaves, feltings, tar-marks, and the dirt which always remained after
months’ wear by the sheep; then it had to be sorted out for dyeing,
which latter was a most unpleasant process. Layers of the various
colors of wools after being dyed were rolled together and carded
on coarse wool-cards, again and again, then slightly greased by a
disagreeable and tiresome method, then run into rolls. The wool was
spun on the great wheel which stood in the kitchen with the reel and
swifts, and often by the glowing firelight the mother spun. A tender
and beautiful picture of this domestic scene has been drawn by Dr.
Gurdon Russell, of Hartford, in his _Up Neck in 1825_.
My mother was spinning with the great wheel, the white rolls of wool
lay upon the platform, and as they were spun upon the spindle, she
turning the wheel with one hand, and with extended arm and delicate
fingers holding the roll in the other, stepping backwards and forwards
lightly till it was spun into yarn, it formed a picture to me, sitting
upon a low stool, which can never be forgotten. Her movements were
every grace, her form all of beauty to me who opposite sat and was
watching her dextrous fingers.
The manufacture of flax into linen material was ever felt to be of
vast importance, and was encouraged by legislation from earliest
colonial days, but it received a fresh impulse in New England through
the immigration of about one hundred Irish families from Londonderry.
They settled in New Hampshire on the Merrimac about 1719. They spun
and wove by hand, but with far more skill than prevailed among those
English settlers who had already become Americans. They established
a manufactory according to Irish methods, and attempts at a similar
establishment were made in Boston. There was much public excitement
over spinning. Women, rich as well as poor, appeared on Boston Common
with their wheels, thus making spinning a popular holiday recreation. A
brick building was erected as a spinning-school, and a tax was placed
in 1737 to support it. But this was not an industrial success, the
excitement died out, the public spinning-school lost its ephemeral
popularity, and the wheel became again simply a domestic duty and pride.
For many years after this, housewives had everywhere flax and hemp to
spin and weave in their homes, and the preparation of these staples
seems to us to-day a monumental labor. On almost every farm might
be seen a patch of the pretty flax, ripening for the hard work of
pulling, rippling, rotting, breaking, swingling, and combing, which
all had to be done before it came to the women’s hands for spinning.
The seed was sown broad-cast, and allowed to grow till the bobs or
bolls were ripe. The flax was then pulled and spread neatly in rows to
dry. This work could be done by boys. Then men whipped or threshed or
rippled out all the seed to use for meal; afterwards the flax stalks
were allowed to lie for some time in water until the shives were
thoroughly rotten, when they were cleaned and once more thoroughly
dried and tied in bundles. Then came work for strong men, to break
the flax on the ponderous flaxbreak, to get out the hard “hexe” or
“bun,” and to swingle it with a swingle knife, which was somewhat
like a wooden dagger. Active men could swingle forty pounds a day on
the swingling-board. It was then hetchelled or combed or hackled by
the housewife, and thus the rough tow was gotten out, when it was
straightened and made ready for the spruce distaff, round which it
was finally wrapped. The hatchelling was tedious work and irritating
to the lungs, for the air was filled with the fluffy particles which
penetrated everywhere. The thread was then spun on a “little wheel.” It
was thought that to spin two double skeins of linen, or four double
skeins of tow, or to weave six yards of linen, was a good day’s work.
For a week’s work a girl received fifty cents and “her keep.” She thus
got less than a cent and a half a yard for weaving. The skeins of linen
thread went through many tedious processes of washing and bleaching
before being ready for weaving; and after the cloth was woven it was
“bucked” in a strong lye, time and time again, and washed out an equal
number of times. Then it was “belted” with a maple beetle on a smooth,
flat stone; then washed and spread out to bleach in the pure sunlight.
Sometimes the thread, after being spun and woven, had been washed and
belted a score of times ere it was deemed white and soft enough to use.
The little girls could spin the “swingling tow” into coarse twine, and
the older ones make “all tow” and “tow and linen” and “harden” stuffs
to sell.
To show the various duties attending the manufacture of these domestic
textiles by a Boston woman of intelligence and social standing, as late
as 1788, let me quote a few entries from the diary of the wife of Col.
John May:--
A large kettle of yarn to attend upon. Lucretia and self rinse our
through many waters, get out, dry, attend to, bring in, do up and sort
110 score of yarn, this with baking and ironing.
Went to hackling flax.
Rose early to help Ruth warp and put a piece in the loom.
Baking and hackling yarn. A long web of tow to whiten and weave.
The wringing out of this linen yarn was most exhausting, and the
rinsing in various waters was no simple matter in those days, for
the water did not conveniently run into the houses through pipes and
conduits, but had to be laboriously carried in pailfuls from a pump, or
more frequently raised in a bucket from a well.
I am always touched, when handling the homespun linens of olden times,
with a sense that the vitality and strength of those enduring women,
through the many tedious and exhausting processes which they had
bestowed, were woven into the warp and woof with the flax, and gave to
the old webs of linen their permanence and their beautiful texture. How
firm they are, and how lustrous! And how exquisitely quaint and fine
are their designs; sometimes even Scriptural designs and lessons are
woven into them. They are, indeed, a beautiful expression of old-time
home and farm life. With their close-woven, honest threads runs this
finer beauty, which may be impalpable and imperceptible to a stranger,
but which to me is real and ever-present, and puts me truly in touch
with the life of my forbears. But, alas, it is through intuition we
must learn of this old-time home life, for it has vanished from our
sight, and much that is beautiful and good has vanished with it.
The associations of the kitchen fireside that linger in the hearts
of those who are now old can find no counterpart in our domestic
surroundings to-day. The welcome cheer of the open fire, which graced
and beautified even the humblest room, is lost forever with the close
gatherings of the family, the household occupations, the homespun
industries which formed and imprinted in the mind of every child the
picture of a home.
Transcriber’s Notes
Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
Page 100: “take the the case” changed to “take the case”
Page 162: “promply sailed” changed to “promptly sailed”
Page 302: “was was set outside” changed to “was set outside”
Spelling and punctuation quoted from original sources has been left
as-is.