Colonial dames and good wives

by Alice Morse Earle

Two heads and one body.

There were still other wooden vessels. In his Philocothonista, or The Drunkard Opened, Dissected and Anatomized (1635), Thomas Heywood, gives for “carouseing-bowles of wood” these names: “mazers, noggins, whiskins, piggins, cruizes, wassel-bowles, ale-bowles, court-dishes, tankards, kannes.”

There were many ways of usefully employing the winter evening hours. Some thrifty folk a hundred years ago occupied spare time in sticking card-teeth in wool-cards. The strips of pierced leather and the wire teeth bent in proper shape were supplied to them by the card manufacturer. The long leather strips and boxes filled with the bent wire teeth might be seen standing in many a country home, and many an evening by the light of the blazing fire,—for the work required little eyesight or dexterity,—sat the children on dye-pot, crickets, and logs of wood, earning a scant sum to add to their “broom-money.”

By the side of the chimney, in New England country houses, always hung a broom or besom of peeled birch. These birch brooms were a characteristic New England production. To make one a straight birch-tree from three to four inches in diameter was chosen, and about five feet of the trunk was cut off. Ten inches from the larger end a notch was cut around the stick, and the bark peeled off from thence to the end. Then with a sharp knife the bared end was carefully split up to the notch in slender slivers, which were held back by the broom-maker’s left hand until they became too many and too bulky to restrain, when they were tied back with a string. As the tendency of the slivers or splints was to grow slightly thinner toward the notch, there was left in the heart of the growing broom a short core, which had to be whittled off. When this was done the splints were all turned back to their first and natural position, a second notch was cut an inch above the first one, leaving a strip of bark an inch in diameter; the bark was peeled off from what was destined to be the broom handle, and a series of splints was shaved down toward the second notch. Enough of the stick was left to form the handle; this was carefully whittled until an inch or so in diameter, was smoothed, and furnished with a hole in the end in which to place a string or a strip of leather for suspension. The second series of splints from the handle end was firmly turned down and tied with hempen twine over the wholly splintered end, and all the splints cut off the same length. The inch of bark which remained of the original tree helped to hold the broom-splints firmly in place.

When these brooms were partly worn, the restraining string could be removed, and the flaring splints formed an ideal oven-besom, spreading and cleaning the ashes from every corner and crevice. Corn brooms were unknown in these country neighborhoods until about the middle of the present century.

A century, and even as late as half a century ago, many a farmer’s son (and daughter too) throughout New England earned his or her first spending-money by making birch brooms for the country stores, from whence they were sent to the large cities, especially Boston, where there was a constant demand for them. In Northampton, about 1790, one shopkeeper kept as many as seven or eight hundred of these brooms on hand at one time.

The boys and girls did not grow rich very fast at broom-making. Throughout Vermont, fifty years ago, the uniform price paid to the maker for these brooms was but six cents apiece, and as he had to work at least three evenings to make one broom,—to say nothing of the time spent in selecting and cutting the birch-tree,—it was not so profitable an industry as gathering beech-nuts at a dollar a bushel. Major Robert Randolph told in fashionable London circles, that about the year 1750, he carried many a load of these birch brooms on his back ten miles to Concord, that he might thus earn a few shillings. Such brooms were known by different names in different localities: birch brooms, splinter brooms, and Indian brooms. The Indians were very proficient in making them, and it is said invented them. This can readily be believed, for like birch-bark canoes and snowshoes, they are examples of perfection in utility and in the employment of native materials. Squaws wandered over certain portions of the country bearing brooms on their backs, peddling them from house to house for ninepence apiece and a drink of cider. In 1806, one minister of Haverhill, New Hampshire, had two of these brooms given to him as a marriage fee. When a Hadley man planted broom corn in 1797, and made corn brooms to sell, he was scornfully met with the remark that broom-making was work for Indians and boys. It was long ere his industry crowded out the sturdy birch brooms.

There were many domestic duties which did not waft sweet “odors of Araby;” the annual spring manufacture of soft soap for home consumption was one of them, and also one of the most important and most trying of all the household industries. The refuse grease from the family cooking was stowed away in tubs and barrels through the cool winter months in unsavory masses, and the wood-ashes from the great fireplaces were also thriftily stored until the carefully chosen time arrived. The day was selected with much deliberation, after close consultation with that family counselor, the almanac, for the moon must be in the right quarter, and the tide at the flood, if the soap were to “come right.” Then the leach was set outside the kitchen door. Some families owned a strongly made leach-tub, some used a barrel, others cut a section from a great birch-tree, and removed the bark to form a tub, which was placed loosely in a circular groove in a base made of wood or, preferably, of stone. This was not set horizontally, but was slightly inclined. The tub was filled with ashes, and water was scantily poured in until the lye trickled or leached out of an outlet cut in the groove at the base. The “first run” of lye was not strong enough to be of use, and was poured again upon the ashes. The wasted ashes were replenished again and again, and water poured in small quantities on them, and the lye accumulated in a receptacle placed for it. It was a universal test that when the lye was strong enough to hold up an egg, it was also strong enough to use for the soap boiling. In the largest iron pot the grease and lye were boiled together, often over a great fire built in the open air. The leached ashes were not deemed refuse and waste; they were used by the farmer as a fertilizer. Soap made in this way, while rank and strong, is so pure and clean that it seems almost like a jelly, and shows no trace of the vile grease that helped to form it.

The dancing firelight shone out on no busier scene than on the grand candle-dipping. It had taken weeks to prepare for this domestic industry, which was the great household event of the late autumn, as soap-making was of the spring. Tallow had been carefully saved from the domestic animals killed on the farm, the honeyed store of the patient bee had been robbed of wax to furnish materials, and there was still another source of supply.

The summer air of the coast of New England still is sweet with one of the freshest, purest plant-perfumes in the world—the scent of bayberry. These dense woody shrubs bear profusely a tiny, spicy, wax-coated berry; and the earliest colonists quickly learned that from this plentiful berry could be obtained an inflammable wax, which would replace and supplement any lack of tallow. The name so universally applied to the plant—candleberry—commemorates its employment for this purpose. I never pass the clumps of bayberry bushes in the early autumn without eagerly picking and crushing the perfumed leaves and berries; and the clean, fresh scent seems to awaken a dim recollection,—a hereditary memory,—and I see, as in a vision, the sober little children of the Puritans standing in the clear glowing sunlight, and faithfully stripping from the gnarled bushes the waxy candleberries; not only affording through this occupation material assistance to the household supplies, but finding therein health, and I am sure happiness, if they loved the bayberries as I, their descendant, do.