Thus article first appeared in The Georgetown Tide, summer 1986

Home Life 1850
Georgetown Style

As related to Roy Newman

We not only produced our own food, but our clothing as well… that is, the woolen and linen part of it. Cotton goods we bought from peddlers.

There wasn’t a farm but had a flock of sheep on it. They kept the grass nibbled right down to the ground; the pastures was as smooth as the hay fields… not all trees and bushes like they be now. We raised quantities of wool and every little brook was dammed up for a carding mill or a fulling mill.

You don’t see no poor old grandmothers spinning wool these days. Didn’t they used to look comical, walking back and for’ard,
pullin’ on that wool. The art and knack of it was to haul the thread in proportion to the velocity of the wheel. If they pulled too hard, they’d break the thread; and if they pulled too slack, the thread would be as big around as your finger.

And the crazy quilts they sewed in the evenings! Little jib pieces and mainsail pieces and topsail pieces, all colors of the rainbow. That quilt over there on my bed has got sixteen hundred pieces in it and my mother sewed every stitch of it.

Our suits was all home-weave, on hand looms. Our old big loom stretched to the ceiling and covered a whole side of the room. It had a bench in front and treadles underneath. Only a few houses had looms. In a small cottage there wouldn’t be room for one. Consequently an expert weaving woman used to come in and weave on our big loom for all the community.

The gals mixed flax and wool together to make linsey-woolsey, a black and white checky material, and made all their own dresses of it. And they never had but two; one for every day and on for to go to meeting.

Men’s and boys clothing were made by some old tailor. They took your measure and you sent ‘em a piece of homespun goods, and then when the suit was done, they returned the listings or selvage, and people used it for to wind around quilting frames. Nothing went loose those days, I tell you!

We either made our own shoes or had ‘em made by a country shoemaker… sometimes high legged boots, but mostly these brogues or low shoes and the leather was obtained from our own cattle.
First the hair was removed from the skins with lime and sold to masons for to mix in the plaster. Then the hides were buried in the earth for a certain period: in pits or vats, with hemlock bark and water and allowed to remain there for over a year, after which they were scraped and dressed.

Every old farmer had his lap-stone and his cobbler’s bench and his shoemaker’s tools. The lap-stone was a smooth rock from the seashore, oval in shape and about 10 inches acrost. Heavy? Well, rather! But their knees got calloused if they done much of it. The crude leather was too soft and porous and it had to be hammered and hammered on these lap-stones, mind you, till it was more compact. The hammer didn’t weigh more than half a pound and the head of it was rounding, like a ball, so’s not to cut or bruise the leather.

The cobbler’s last was crude and clumsy. They didn’t used to fit the shoes to the foot as they do now. And they was all pegged with little beech-wood pegs.

The “frow” (froe: a cleaving tool) for making shoe pegs was a straight piece of iron with a handle at one end of it, and they’d saw off a disc from a beech log, just as thick as the peg was long, and lay the frow on top of it and fetch it a clip with a mallet and cut off a thin slice, just as wide as the peg was, and then they’d take a shoe knife and bevel the bottom edges a little, so’s the pegs would be peaked like a wedge; then they’d chip off the pegs themselves. You could make a quart of them in ten minutes.

Did they stick into your feet? Sartain! Couldn’t be otherwise. The inner sole was part of the upper and the pegs went right through the two soles ( they made holes for them with an awl) and there was an instrument made expressly for the purpose of rasping the ends off on the inside and makin’ em flush with where your foot came. So if a peg worked up and stuck into your foot, you could take your shoe off and file it down again.

The shoemaker would stop at the house two or three days, at a certain time of year , and make shoes for all us children.  the gals put his bench in my brother’s room, right where the bed usually stood, because there was good light there and he’d be out of the way. They intended to remove it before night, but they forgot. Lang was in the habit of undressing in the dark and fetching a leap into bed. So when he got out of his pants he dove headfirst into the cobbler’s bench, in amongst the tools. Maybe he wasn’t mad!

Us boys went barefoot all summer and got stone-galls on the balls of our feet; and our toenails got hurted and come off. But they growed again, and we didn’t mind. The worst feature was this mercury or p’ison ivy. I’ve seen fellers swell up awfully and like to died with it. We used to go barefoot way into November, and I recollect sliding barefoot on the ice. Oh, I was a tough little salamander.

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For lights we burned tallow- dips. Some ran their candles in moulds. But the landed class that was well to do and killed lots of stock in the fall, would melt up vats of this grease or tallow, and then they’d loop ten wicks over a frame and dip’em in the vat, up and down, and the grease would adhere to them ‘till they were proper size.

The next improvement in lighting were fish-oil lamps. Stink! They’d stink you right out of the house. And they didn’t give more light than a yellow-eyed bean. Poor people that couldn’t afford the lamps used to pour a little of this oil in a saucer and let the wick hang out over the edge. After fish-oil they got “fluid” and it was all the time blowing up, like gasoline, till they had to discard it and stop using it altogether. Then they got kerosene, and now they’ve got electricity. I’d like to live another ninety years and see what they’ll be using by that time.

Every housewife cal’lated to make soap just as much as she churned butter. They put hardwood ashes in a barrel and poured in water, and at the bottom where they drained it off, they hove in a layer of thatch. That would act as a strainer and strain the lye.
You had to be careful handling it, ‘cause it would burn a hole in your hand in no time, owing to the strength of it. When it was ready, you poured it into a big iron kettle, and then you poured in grease and boiled it a certain length of time, and that made soft soap. We always kept a barrel of it in the shed, just outside the kitchen door, and it was lovely to wash your hands in. So sleek and smooth and slippery!

For hard soap, they boiled it longer till it formed a kind of paste, and then it would congeal and they could cut it into squares.

Speaking of soap, most people never took but two baths a year… when they changed from summer underwear to winter underwear and the other way to. And they didn’t wash their head in their life time. ‘Fraid they’d catch their death of cold. That was the way I was brought up, but I wash my head by wetting of it, and that’s all it requires. And I take a bath once a week regular. Old as I be, the skin of my body’s as smooth as a newborn babe. That shows I bathe often enough. These cranks that takes a bath every day washes all the strength out of ’em; if I’d done that, I’d been in my grave long before this.

There is no way to identify the person who was interviewed by Roy Newman. He talked with a number of people on the Island and either they remained anonymous or he created a fictitious name for them.
Out of curiosity, we looked up “mercury” in the dictionary and found that poison ivy does belong to the plant genus “herba mercurialis.” The old timers knew their botany!