Corn Husk Mattress

Because of the material used various vermin.

Corn husk mattress.

Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks. At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair. Commonplace during the great depression corn husk mattresses were homemade by farm folk. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would.

In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter. The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day. Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags. Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga.

The corn husk mattress took quite a long time to prepare. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows. Straw doesn t have to be stuffed into a mattress cover before you can sleep on it. The guest bed was up in the attic.

Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill. 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. Mattress meant something totally different back in the day. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses.

Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress. Field corn was a very. 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.

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