Saturday Night Bath
The following are excerpts from The Romances of a Country Doctor, a paper read at the annual meeting of the Northampton Historical Society at the Unitarian Church, Northampton, on October 7, 1947 and Plain Tales from Plainfield or The Way Things Used to Be, 1962, both by Clara Elizabeth Hudson. Ms. Hudson was a granddaughter of Dr. Samuel Shaw and the last surviving relative to live in the Shaw Hudson House.
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“My family was fortunate in having a tin tub which an adult could use comfortably. It always reminded me of a man’s inverted straw hat except that the central part, into which the water from the nearby cook stove was poured, was round instead of oval. At one place on the brim a flat seat with a leg under it, all of tin, gave one a safe perch. Nearby was a raised tin ridge to hold a cake of soap. The brim sloped so that water ladled with a dipper Would run down toward the center. The tub, made of tin painted green on the outside and white inside, had a ring at the edge so that it could be hung on a large nail on the woodshed wall. The tub had been the property of my uncle, Dr. S. Francis Shaw; it had his name painted on the reverse of the brim, and presumably was taken by him on his many sea voyages when he was a surgeon in the navy.
Many people used the wooden tub in which the family laundry was done. Children could sit in the tub and have a real scrub with castile soap. Adults either stood or sat on a chair close to the tub so that their feet and legs were in the water. In the era of the wood-burning cook-stove, the wide-open oven door yielded welcome warmth. When a long lasting fire was desired, freshly cut or green wood was used and often, I have been told, it was slightly dried in the stove’s oven with the oven door open. Sap oozing from the wood had a pleasant pungent odor. Among my memories of early summers in Plainfield is the bucket of soft soap used for cleaning in those times. Before the day of buying lye from Babbitt, it was obtained by pouring water through wood ashes and straining the resulting liquid lye. The product obtained from the mixture of soft fat and lye was dark and very strong. It was kept in a bucket and spooned into the water used for cleaning. In later life I often made soap from Babbitt’s lye dissolved in water and carefully mixed with cleansed, strained, liquefied, left-over fats. A cake of the soap thus made I took once to a chemist, and it proved to be perfectly blended, having in it neither free acid nor free alkali.
In later years a fireboard closed off the use of the fireplace and an iron cook stove was used for cooking and heating. This was the arrangement during my childhood and until some time in the 1930’s. Electric current was brought to some twenty centrally located Plainfield homes sometime in the 1920’s, at which time kerosene lamps were replaced by electricity. Filling the lamps with kerosene, polishing lamp chimneys and trimming wicks had been one of my chores, and I was delighted to be rid of those jobs. For reading, student lamps had yielded a very soft shaded light; much better than the light from unshaded lamps.“
To learn more about the history of bathing check out the History of Hygiene: Bathing, Teeth Cleaning, Toileting, & Deodorizing by Eliza Knight
