soap

July 31, 1852

images

Women making potash soap, circa 1900*

1852 July 31st  Saturday  Have made two barrels

of potash soap and have had very good luck  This 

afternoon have been mending  Catharine Murphy came

this afternoon to sew for me and Im sure I hope she

will be worth something for it  Mary has been to work

on her own dress this afternoon   Susan &

self have been to Augustus this evening

and staid until ten  He is getting quite smart

This was a full Saturday for Evelina. She made a large batch of soap and was quite pleased with the result. Soap-making is an art, and Evelina was good at it. She knew enough about it, indeed, to be grateful for her own success. Of course, she could have purchased soap in the city or, perhaps, even in the Ames’s general store, but the farm girl in her resisted spending money on something she could make herself.

Lydia Maria Child, author of The American Frugal Housewife, devotes a whole page of her slim volume to making soap. “In the country,” she states unequivocally, “I am certain, it is good economy to make one’s own soap.” She offers various measures of ingredients: “To make a barrel of soap, it will require about five or six bushels of ashes, with at least four quarts of unslacked stone lime,” after which “[t]hree pounds of grease should be put into a pailful of lye.”** The trick to making soap depended on the sequence in which the ingredients were mixed, and at what temperature. It was a backyard chemistry experiment.

After the hard work of soap-making, in which Evelina was no doubt assisted by a servant, and an afternoon of mending, Evelina and her daughter Susan went to see her nephew. Augustus had fallen quite ill two weeks earlier with fever, but was now on the mend.

 

* Image courtesy of http://www.wildernessarena.com

** Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1841

June 19, 1851

Barrel

June 19th Thursday  Weeding in the garden untill past

nine  Heat my grease and made a barrel

of soap.  poured the grease in hot and potash

cold with a little hot water and it has come well.

This afternoon have cut the sleeves for my stone

colour borage dress and have worked some on

the hair cloth cover for the lounge.  Harriet

come into my chamber for an hour or two.

Bridgett here. 

 

This was a fine June day for working out of doors.  Old Oliver noted in his journal that “We mowed back of Kellys to day,” describing a piece of land north of their house near the ponds.

At the house, or rather, in the yard, Evelina and probably Jane McHanna made soap. As their mothers had done before them, they boiled animal fat (of which they had plenty on hand) in an iron kettle over an open fire. When ready, they “poured the grease […] hot,” into a barrel and added potash, a generic term for lye, a product that was typically obtained from wood ashes. The Ames weren’t burning wood at the house anymore, though, so where and how Evelina got her potash is uncertain. Any thoughts, readers?

Evelina had made soap before and was confident in the process. “It has come well.”  However, she and countless other housewives would soon find that this skill was no longer necessary as commercial soap became available. After the Civil War, especially, manufactured soap would gradually replace homemade soap, except in the remote pockets and far reaches of the migrating frontier.

Some 750 miles to the west of Easton, in fact, in the bustling river town of Cincinnati, a candlemaker named William Procter and a soap-maker named James Gamble had been manufacturing soap for about fourteen years. Besides wanting to make a good product, they wanted to sell it to a broader market. Using the animal fats from the nearby “Porkopolis” slaughterhouses and fronting the Ohio river, they had both material and transportation right at hand. Their enterprise would succeed. Homemakers like Evelina would no longer need to stand over a hot kettle to make soap.