February 22, 1987
By Jan Buffington
Vigo County Historical Society
This is the way we washed our clothes
Even before what we call the dawn of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the lake dwellers were beating their clothes on rocks in streams to get them clean.
The first advances in laundry are attributed to the Egyptian women who took their wash to the banks of the Nile and used the soil found there to help clean the fabrics. The Egyptian soil contains a natural purifying agent which is an earthly alkali called nitre or natron. Sand, ashes and soapwort root were used similarly in other parts of the ancient world. Fuller’s earth later was used, first by the Greeks, then by the Romans to clean woolen fabric.
Documents relate that in Gaul--now France--around A.D. 70, the Gauls boiled goat tallow with a liquid drawn from beechwood ashes (lye) that they used as a hair pomade. Later, a Greek physician, Galen, observed that the Gallic mixture was an effective cleanser.
In Sapo Hill, outside Rome, a similar form of soap was discovered. Fat that melted from sacrificial animals would run down from the altar mixing with the wood ashes from the fire and the clay soil around the fire. This would get on the priests’ robes. When the women washed the robes that were saturated with the mixture, the robes would be cleaner than robes that did not have the clay on them. It is generally accepted that the word soap comes from Sapo.
Because the Gallic mixture was too expensive and the Sapo mixture too rare, most women continued washing clothes with only water and their own energy. In the 9th century, Ibn Hajan Dschabir, an Arabian alchemist, developed the first known soap formula, and soap gained a wider use in washing clothes.
Marseilles in France, Savona in Italy and Castile in Spain grew to be the first great centers of the soap industry.
In the American Colonies, soap making was largely done by the housewife, who used fats saved from the dripping pan or tallow at butchering time and soap-ash (lye). The housewife might have used the following recipe: 1 gallon and 1 quart water, 4 1/2 pounds fat, and 1 can lye brought to boil in a large black kettle.
The kettle was placed over a corn cob fire outside on the side of the house so the smoke wouldn’t blow toward the house. The housewife boiled the mixture for about two hours, using a wooden paddle to stir it constantly. At that time she added 1/2 pint of salt and continued boiling the mixture for another one-half hour. The kettle then was removed from the fire and cooled overnight. In the morning, the soap was at the top.
She then sliced it into bars and put it on a board to dry, a process that took from two to four weeks. The soap then was ready to pack in barrels for storage. It was used for washing clothes or dishes. The housewife doubled or tripled her recipe to fit the size of the pot or the amount of fat she had at the time.
About 1806 William Colgate of New York founded what soon became the largest establishment of soap making. “Store bought” soap became widely used in the larger populated areas of America. It first came in the form of hard bars. Later, manufacturing techniques made powdered and flaked soaps available to the homemaker.
During the middle of the 19th century, the homemaker started to use additives to get her wash white and brighter than her neighbors wash. These products included starch, bluing and sal soda.
Starch is a sizing agent that gives a crisp and smooth finish to fabric and help protect against the penetration of dirt into the fibers. Early starches were made by making a creamy mixture of dry corn starch (flour was used when corn starch wasn’t available) and water, then adding boiling water and stirring it vigorously to prevent lumps from forming.
Bluing, a preparation of blue and violet dyes, was purchased at the general store. It was used to counteract the yellowish tinge of white linen and cotton.
Sal soda, known today as sodium carbonate or washing soda, was used as a cleaner, deodorizer and water softener.
If a homemaker wished to bleach her whites, she spread them on the grass in the sun to dry, as chemical bleaches had not been developed.
The historical treasure this week includes several forms of laundry aids. These items range from a small chunk of homemade lye soap, to bottles of bluing, to boxes of manufactured soaps. Other examples of laundry aids are displayed in the General Store in the museum.
The Historical Museum of the Wabash Valley, 1411 S. Sixth St., is open from 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.