Hygiene Day: Hampton’s Depreciation Lands Museum explores Colonial cleanliness

For early settlers of what now is Western Pennsylvania, “cleanliness is next to godliness” represented far more than a catchy expression.

The cemetery at Hampton’s Depreciation Lands Museum contains some stark reminders of why that was the case, including the markers for several members of a single family who died in a diphtheria epidemic.

In recognition of the importance that pioneers placed on staying as sanitary as possible, the museum presented Hygiene Day on Aug. 28, with interpreters explaining and demonstrating a variety of common 18th-century practices.

“Yes, they did bathe,” volunteer coordinator Dennis Raible told guests as they arrived for the event, which regularly features depictions of life in the Colonial era. “They weren’t dirty, bug-infested vermin, like the movies would have you believe.”

Keeping clean primarily involves using soap, and Carol Greiner, president of the museum’s board, showed how it was made long before the availability of Ivory and Irish Spring.

For the first step, picture leftover pot roast in the refrigerator and the grease that congeals around it. Settlers would save that stuff for extended periods, to the point where it became rancid.

“So they would reboil it, and it would help to sweeten it back up again and remove any of the impurities that were in it,” Greiner said, and the resulting concoction was combined with lye water, a substance derived from wood ash.

“At that stage, we combine it with our rendered fats and then we boil it,” she said. “And in six to eight hours, we’ll have soap that’s ready to use.”

Lye, a strongly alkaline solution, is essential in producing soap.

“The process is called saponification,” Greiner said. “If you don’t have that, you’re just going to end up with water and fat.”

Clean clothing

Putting properly saponified substances to use for laundering was volunteer Sarah Carroll, who wielded a wooden paddle to whack white linen caps into a state of cleanliness.

“What that does is forces the soapy water through the fibers,” she said, offering guests the opportunity to give the activity a try.

As for linen fabric, it once served a major hygienic purpose by way of its absorbency.

“You’re going to sweat into your linen, not into your clothing,” Babeth Raible, Dennis’ wife, said as she displayed various examples of undergarments. “So when they talk about people only having two pairs of clothes, they might only have had a couple. But you probably had several pairs of linen.”

Producing linen was, in her words, an arduous task. Volunteers Jessica Welker and Madelyn Legler demonstrated the series of steps, starting with the raw materials.

“Because we can’t grow cotton here — it’s not warm enough — we grow flax,” Welker said about the grasslike plant also known as linseed. “When the flax is fully grown, we pull it from the roots and lay it out into the field. The dew will start to rot away the outside.”

That step is known as retting, and after that comes breaking the stalks into smaller pieces using, appropriately enough, a breaking machine.

Further refining is done through scutching, which involves swinging a knife to scrape the remaining flax, and hackling with devices called hackles that work like a comb or brush.

Their sharp metal teeth, though, can present a challenge: Legler admitted to a few injuries, but they haven’t halted her from hackling.

Beauty and health

Deviating a bit from the era’s bare necessities, volunteer Tiffany Apan gave a Hygiene Day presentation on beauty-oriented products such as cosmetics and perfume, some of which possessed medicinal attributes. For example, sage and rose hips, the flower’s seed pods, helped mitigate minor skin conditions, such as acne and eczema.

“They were known to help speed along cell regeneration. So if you had a tooth pulled, they would often give you rose hips or sage tea in order to help with the healing,” Apan said. “Or if you had a wound, they would give you a paste or some sort of tonic with sage and rose hips in it, in order to help ward off infection and help heal the wound a lot more quickly. Both were used as mouthwashes, too.”

Conversely, not-so-healthy substances continued to be in vogue, as well.

“The use of coal or lead around the eyes and the skin dates back to ancient Egypt and the Middle East,” Apan said, until publications of the early 19th century started advising women to switch to safer materials.

More cosmetic and personal-hygiene products were shown by volunteer Kai Edwards, including a primordial deodorant.

“Now, you would first have to pluck all of the hair out of your armpits before using it,” he said.

‘Nothing went to waste’

Drawing on the aspect of keeping healthy with effective roof coverings, Obadiah Miller — in the 21st century, he’s Steve Kubiak — gave a presentation on the aspect of keeping healthy with effective roof coverings. Among the methods on what then was the frontier was fashioning wood shakes.

“I have to put up a roof quickly, because my family’s coming and my wife doesn’t want a leaky roof,” he said. “So I’m using my hatchet to split wood and shape this thing all in one. I don’t care what length it is. I don’t care what width it is. I just need to get it up there. So this is very rustic-looking.”

Skilled craftsmen took a more professional approach in producing shingles.

“Whoever is purchasing them wants them the same width, the same length, the same thickness,” Kubiak said. “And they also want something very smooth.”

The resulting shavings probably were put to good use, as well, similar to the byproduct of the flax hackling process.

“As you do this, you’ll notice that a lot of that junk, garbage, fluff, is coming out. It makes really good fire starter,” Welker said. “It makes really good wadding for your gun.”

In fact, a recurring theme at the Depreciation Lands Museum is how the general lifestyle of the 18th century tended to contrast sharply with today’s rampant consumerism.

“They used everything,” Apan said. “Nothing went to waste, even if you were in a wealthy household, because you never knew what could happen.”

For more information, visit www.dlmuseum.org.