When I was growing up our family didn’t buy much laundry soap. We made it ourselves—or I should say, Mom made it with our help. The type of soap she made was called “lye soap.” I will try to explain how it was made although I may miss some of the steps.
To make lye soap you had to have a large pot or barrel (about fifty gallon capacity) for cooking the soap and a good supply of oil or lard or fat. You needed several cans of lye and wash tubs to pour the finished soap into for cooling. You needed a long stick for stirring and someplace flat like a floor, where the soap could be dried. I think it also helped to have a few kids around to watch the pot boil and to stir the soap mixture occasionally.
In the section where I describe the butchering process, I explained that when pigs were butchered, the layer of fat below the pig skin was “rendered” or cooked so that the fat was separated from the skin or other meat. The fat or lard or grease (whichever you want to call it) was placed in a twenty-five gallon barrel on the back porch. Other fat from cooking could be added to the barrel at any time. When the barrel was full, it was time to make soap.
Dad had cut a large barrel in half and we used one of those half barrels for the cooking pot. We set the barrel on top of several large stones or bricks and then built a fire underneath the barrel. We then poured the lard or grease from the twenty-five gallon barrel where we had collected it into the larger cooking pot. Once the grease began to boil, we could skim impurities off the top and discard them.
I can’t remember exactly the consistency required or the time needed to get the grease to the proper stage or thickness for making soap, but we stayed close by to stir the grease occasionally and to skim off any impurities that came to the surface. The process took several hours. Mom would watch and test the boiling oil until it was at the right stage and then she would add the lye solution. As far as I know, it was just lye and water but there could have been other ingredients. Lye is a very corrosive material and dangerous to handle so Mom did the mixing of the lye solution. Once the lye was added, then it was a matter of stirring the mixture until it turned to soap. As it turned to soap, it became a light creamy yellow color and got much thicker.
Once the soap was ready, we lifted the half barrel with the soap off the fire and poured the warm soap into two or three large wash tubs to a depth of about four or five inches per tub, where it was allowed to cool. As it cooled, it got thicker until you could cut it with a large knife. It was more or less the consistency of cheesecake. It usually took a couple of days for the soap to cool and become hard enough to cut. When the soap was cool, we cut it into square pieces about four to six inches square. The soap was taken out of the tub and the pieces were laid out on newspaper on the wash house floor to dry and cure. As the soap dried or cured, it became harder and shrank some in size. When it was completely dry, the soap was stored on one of the shelves in the wash house.
Whenever Mom was ready to wash clothes, she would take a piece of that soap and just throw it into the washer where the agitator was swishing and let it provide the soap for washing the clothes. When the wash was finished she would fish out what was left of the piece of soap and use it again the next time. It was not uncommon for one of us boys to find a small piece of reused soap in a pocket of our jeans. When the piece of soap got small enough, it could get hung up in a pants pocket and we would find it when the clothes were dry. Lye soap was very good for washing dirty clothes. It was so strong in fact that it ate up our clothes. Our Levi’s always had that washed out color and eventually the soap would just eat through the material and we would end up with holes in our clothes. Later on Mom used laundry detergent for washing some of the clothes but not until I was in high school.
The making of soap is another example of how Mom and Dad tried to be self‑reliant and thrifty. I don’t think I or any of my brothers came out any the worse for wear. In fact, we may have been cleaner than our friends who used Tide or Breeze or Cheer or some other sweet smelling soap.
All the time I was at home Mom used the old “wringer washing machine” for washing clothes. You have probably never heard of a “wringer washing machine,” much less seen one in operation, so I will try to explain how it worked. The machine itself consisted of a few key parts. The main part of the machine was a “tub portion” where the clothes were agitated to get out the dirt. The other major mechanism was a “wringer assembly” made up of two hard rubber cylinders that had a narrow opening between them. When engaged, the cylinders turned and the wet clothes were fed between the rubber “wringers” which squeezed the water out of the clothes as they passed from the washer to the rinse water or from the rinse water to be hung on the clothesline. The rinse water was held in a wash tub on a chair next to the washing machine and was not a part of the washing machine itself. The agitator and wringers were run from a small electric motor mounted under the tub. All water for the washing tub and for the rinsing tub had to be filled by bucket or we could use the hose and run hot water from the kitchen sink to the washing machine and rinse tub.
The dirty clothes were put in the tub portion where the agitator was. There was a gear lever on the side of the tub that put the agitator in motion or stopped the motion. When the clothes had been agitated in the tub long enough, the clothes were taken manually out of the tub and fed between the two rubber cylinders or wringers. The wringers squeezed the soapy water out of the clothes. The soapy water went back into the washing machine tub. The wash tub with clean rinse water was on the other side of the wringer so that the squeezed clothes fell into the rinse water. Someone had to slosh the clothes around in the rinse water to rinse out any remaining soap. The clothes were then run back through the wringer in the opposite direction to squeeze out the rinse water. The clothes were then hung on the clothesline to dry. We never had a washer or dryer when I was at home. All of the washing was done with the “wringer washer”. Care had to be taken not to get fingers in the wringers.
One of our jobs was to help with the wash. We carried water to put in the rinse tub and to fill the washer and we carried water to empty them when the wash was completed. We helped with hanging out the clothes as well. Usually everyone got to help. We competed to see who would get the batch of clothes with large items so we could hang them faster and get on to doing something we wanted to do. If you got the socks, it took forever to hang them out to dry because there were so many of them. When the clothes were dry, we had the job of taking them from the clothes line into the house for sorting and ironing. We learned to carry arm loads of dry clothes without dropping any of them on the ground. There was no such thing as fabric softener then because there was no clothes dryer. The clothes were sometimes pretty stiff when we took them from the clothesline. In the winter they sometimes froze on the clothesline. Because we had a clothesline and used clothes pins to hang the clothes on the line, we had a ready supply of clothes pins for making rubber guns, but that is a different story.