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.

Corn husk mattress.

Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress. Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill. Because of the material used various vermin. Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks.

Mattress meant something totally different back in the day. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter. A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress. 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.

Commonplace during the great depression corn husk mattresses were homemade by farm folk. The guest bed was up in the attic. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses. Field corn was a very.

Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary. 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. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows. 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.

At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair. Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga. A prosperous american of the 18th and early 19th centuries slept on a bed made up of several layers. Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags.

The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would.