“Grandma’s Washday”—or Was It?

During a visit to the Lakes District Centennial Museum in Arrowtown, New Zealand, recently, I found myself chuckling over a display marked “Grandma’s Washday.” The display was a collection of old scrub boards, antique irons, and other such gear—and a whimsical list of instructions that told how Grandma used to do the wash:

1.  Bild a fire in back yard to heat kettle of rain water.

2.  Set tubs so smoke wont blow in eyes if wind is pert.

3.  Shave one hole cake of soap in bilin water.

4.  Sort, things, make three piles, 1 pile white, 1 pile cullord, 1 pile workbritches and rags.

5.  Stir flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin water.

6.  Rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, then bile, rub cullord but dont bile—just rench and starch.

7.  Take white things out of kettle with broom stick handle then rench.

8.  Blue and starch.

9.  Spred tee towels on grass.

10.  Hang old rags on fence.

11.  Pore rench water in flower bed.

12.  Scrub porch with hot soapy water.

13.  Turn tubs upside down.

14.  Put on cleen dress—smooth hair with side combs—brew tea—set and rest and rock a spell, and count blessins.

Arrowtown, nestled in the scenic Southern Alps, was a gold-mining boom town in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, like many American boom towns, it is booming again as a tourist attraction and ski center. Its picturesque false-fronted main street reminded me of the main streets of Telluride, Colorado, and Park City, Utah. The Centennial Museum in Arrowtown was organized in 1948.

The “Grandma’s Washday” display fit right in with the atmosphere of history and remoteness. But I thought there was something awfully familiar about the list in the exhibit, so I asked the museum attendant about it. All she knew was that a local resident had donated a printed copy of the list, assuming it had been culled from from some nineteenth-century document, perhaps a set of instructions for a pioneer girl to follow.

So many visitors had enjoyed the “Grandma’s Washday” list, the attendant said, that the museum had printed copies to sell as souvenirs.

I bought one, and I quoted verbatim from it above.

Still, I had to wonder whether the quaint description of demanding handwork, ending with the irony of counting your blessings, was an authentic pioneer document. Like those lists of old-fashioned rules for teachers or office workers, “Grandma’s Washday” seemed like a recent composition. And I felt I had seen the same list somewhere else.

When I got back to the States I located another version—also a printed list that lacked any indication of its age. This one was called “Washday Receet” (sic ) and had been published in 1981 in the North Carolina Folklore Journal , which had reprinted it from a 1975 newspaper article, which had quoted an item sent by a reader.

I probably don’t need to tell you that the lists are very much alike. The North Carolina list has ten rules, all of them closely matching the rules on the New Zealand one—except for combining items five and six, and dropping items seven, eight, and fourteen (the colorful ending statement). The American version also fails to capitalize sentences, though it improves the punctuation by adding a couple of needed commas and dropping the superfluous one at the beginning of item four.

The folksy spelling of words like “bile,” “tee,” and “rench” is taken further by the North Carolina grandmother: she uses “heet” instead of “heat” (as in “cleen” and “receet”), “dreen” instead of “drain,” and “flour” instead of “flower” in Rule 11. The North Carolina grandma uses “lie soap,” and rubs “dirty sheets,” not “dirty spots,” against a board.

Simply comparing the two lists doesn’t enable me to prove which list precedes the other, or whether either, neither, or both are authentic. But the similarities suggest that “Grandma’s Washday” has been passed from person to person in written or printed form, undergoing changes as it is transmitted.

In other words, it’s an authentic piece of folklore.

If the list was written in recent times using old-fashioned spellings and language, then it’s authentic modern folklore. The list shows how we imagine our ancestors living, but not necessarily how they actually lived.

Even if an original text of “Grandma’s Washday” is discovered, with a reliable date attached, the anonymous versions with varying wording found in North Carolina and New Zealand (and likely elsewhere as well) may be considered pieces of modern museum folklore.

What curator could resist displaying such an amusing document?

Another copy of “Grandma’s Washday” surfaced in response to my column. Dorthe Armstrong of Semmes, Alabama, sent me a typed copy of a thirteen-item list that she says, in a handwritten version, “hung above my mother’s wringer washer in a little town in the wheat country of Colorado for as long as I can remember. That was during the forties.” Later Mrs. Armstrong hung a copy of the same list above her own laundry appliances in the various places she has lived. But, unfortunately, she adds, “I never thought to ask my mother where she got it—and now it’s too late.”

Mrs. Armstrong’s version uses all capital letters, and it continues the tradition of folksy spellings: “het” for “heat,” “sope” instead of “soap,” “stur” replacing “stir,” etc. Rule six begins with the variation “RUB DIRT SPOTS ON BOARD,” and Rule 11 is “SCRUP PORCH WITH SOPY WATER.” The text concludes in the familiar way with the clean dress, the side combs, the cup of tea, the rocking chair, and the admonition to “COUNT BLESSINGS.”