Published: May 16, 2008 11:56 am            

Wash Day at the Ranch

Long before the automatic cycle, washing clothes was hard work

Do young people today ever wonder about the huge, black, cast iron flowerpots that are sometimes seen both in front of stately mansions and near old, abandoned farm or ranch houses?

Well, truth is they are fossils that are keys to unraveling the evolution of modern, automatic washing machines.

In about 1934 (and about age 9) I spent some summer weeks with my Uncle Walter Burnett and Aunt Willie Maude in the old limestone house on the Burnett Ranch on the Blanco River in Hays County. I awoke one morning to the sound of Uncle Walter cranking the coffee grinder and Aunt Willie Maude pulling a large, cast iron frying pan out of a cabinet.

I pulled on a pair of short pants and bounded, topless and barefoot, downstairs to the kitchen to see if I could maybe turn the bacon that was already in the frying pan on the wood stove.

"It's Monday and the sun is shining, it's not too windy and that means wash day," Aunt Willie Maude said. "After breakfast you can split some kindling for the fire. Then start getting water from the well and pour it into the big wash pot in the side yard", she continued.

I already knew what "sunny and not windy" had to do with "wash day.” I was happy to try to help earn my keep because I much enjoyed being at the ranch. But I did prefer helping Uncle Walter in rounding up goats and holding infected goats down while he "wormed" those that had been attacked by blowflies.

My first chore of the morning was gathering the hen eggs, which was kind of like an Easter egg hunt, but with only white or brown eggs. Some white porcelain door knobs were left in a few of the nesting places provided for the hens. Supposedly the dumb hens would think these white knobs were eggs and would lay their eggs alongside. But these hens often chose to hide their eggs in odd places. Rattlesnakes sometimes participated in the egg hunt; so Aunt Willie Maude always cautioned me to look out for snakes when gathering eggs.

I did not mind helping Aunt Willie Maude particularly when she was baking a cake or making a peach cobbler. How could she manage to bake such good cakes in an oven with no thermostat and heated by a burning wood? But "wash day" did not sound so great. There was plenty of wood at the woodpile and splitting kindling was quick and easy since I had built many fires for our fireplace in our Austin home. I laid the kindling, some newspaper, and a few bigger sticks of wood under the big, black, cast iron wash pot for Aunt Willie Maude to light the fire when she was ready. (If the wood had been wet she would have doused it with "coal oil" just before lighting it.)

By now the fire was blazing and I added a few sticks of from time to time to keep it up. Aunt Willie Maude brought out three more fossils of a bygone time — homemade, lye soap; bluing; and a scrub board. Scrub boards were made of wood and mounted on one side was about a 15-inch square sheet of corrugated, galvanized metal. She put some of the lye soap in the water and started adding some moderately dirty clothes to be washed. She stirred the clothes around with a smooth, stout stick from which the bark had been removed. By now the water was hot and she used the stick to take out a towel, or some other item, wring out most of the water, and then inspect it. If it had a spot or two she would put it in a moderate size bucket partially filled with hot water. Then she would put the scrub board in the bucket and lay the towel, or whatever, out flat on the board with the offending spot exposed. Then she would rub the spot with lye soap before rubbing the cloth on the corrugated metal of the scrub board. For tougher spots it might take several soap rubs, scrubs and rinses before the item would pass inspection. Then it was wrung out and laid aside. Diapers were pre-soaked in a galvanized tub before being tossed in the hot water in the cast iron pot.

Clothes had to be wrung out repeatedly after each washing with soapy water, and after each rinsing. For my age, my hands were rather large and strong; even so wringing clothes was tiresome. For large, heavy clothes Aunt Willie Maude and I would each take one end and twist the clothes in opposite directions to extract as much water as we could.

Washing was suspended before noon while Aunt Willie Maude went to the kitchen to begin fixing dinner. About noon Uncle Walter rode back and was in the corral taking the saddle off his horse. I ran to meet him and walk with him back to the house. His boots, with spurs jangling, clomped heavily on the stone steps when we entered the side yard.

After a hearty dinner (the main meal with a light supper at night), Uncle Walter spent a few minutes with his baby daughter before heading back to the corral to mount his horse and go back to work.

Washing resumed with Uncle Walter's grease, dung and mud-stained pants and other really dirty items that were soaked for quite a few minutes in the hot water before being stirred around. Next came repeated cycles of hard scrubbing on the scrub board. She had me take turn with these rougher clothes. Wow, this was real work! And it was hot even in the shade of the big oak trees. Now even the breeze felt hot.

Washing clothes took a lot of soap because well water from a limestone aquifer is quite "hard" and results in a prominent "ring around the tub." Did you ever notice the white, limestone crust that forms inside a kettle that is used to heat well water to make tea?

After everything had been washed, it was time for the non-automatic rinse cycle. More water was drawn from the well and carried to fill a number 3 (large), galvanized washtub. Bluing was added to the final rinse water to make the white sheets and white clothes really white. Each unmentionable item, towel, diaper, blouse, skirt, dress, shirt, or pair of pants was rinsed and wrung out. When the rinse water got too soapy, it had to be dumped and the tub re-filled which required still more buckets of water to be drawn from the well. Now the filled buckets seemed much heavier.

Next, it was time for the non-automatic dry cycle. The clothes were carried to the clotheslines and each items was hung with clothespins out to dry. If a rain cloud were to appear we would have to scurry out and gather in any clothes that had already dried and if real rain threatened we would have to take everything in — what a mess! Also if the wind got up, we would have to rush out to gather in the clothes. But this day we were lucky and in due course all the clothes were dry, gathered in, folded, and put away.

Monday washdays meant lots of work, but this day there was still time for fishing. Aunt Willie Maude loved to fish and had the patience to be quite successful. We gathered up the cane fishing poles, the minnow bucket, and the seine and walked down the hill to "The Crossing" which is a shallow, swift-flowing section of the river where a pick up truck, and some cars, could ford the river. After a long wash day it was good to lie back in the shade and watch a cork bobbing on the surface of the clear water - whether or not we caught fish.

I was glad that Monday was the only washday of the week. Wouldn't it be wonderful if some genius would come up with some better way to wash clothes! And all those dirty diapers — wouldn't it be great if there were cheap diapers that could be just thrown away when wet or dirty?

"Wake up Bill! Your cork was bobbing and just now went completely under!"

        

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