Corn Husk Mattress

A prosperous american of the 18th and early 19th centuries slept on a bed made up of several layers.

Corn husk mattress.

One thing they did not like was going out to the cornfield and pulling ears of corn from the corn stalks for the mattresses. Commonplace during the great depression corn husk mattresses were homemade by farm folk. The outer husks are rejected and the softer inner ones are collected and dried in the shade and when dry the hard ends that were attached to the cob are. Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill.

Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks. If that homemade mattress became too flattened my mother opened one of its seams to replace the husks with fresh ones to bring back its fluff its original softness. A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter.

Because of the material used various vermin. A loose heap seems very comfortable compared with sleeping on a hard floor or you can put the straw into a wooden bed with sides like the danish one illustrated below left or this polish bed. Field corn was a very. Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress.

Mattress meant something totally different back in the day. Straw doesn t have to be stuffed into a mattress cover before you can sleep on it. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses. In colonial times the bed was covered with a feather mattress or on earlier beds a chaff bag filled with straw corn husks especially in the south and beech leaves if corn husks were used some people would use the entire husk which would be cut and shredded into small pieces while still green.

Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags. Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary. At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows.

Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would.