June 19th Thursday Weeding in the garden untill past
nine Heat my grease and made a barrel
of soap. poured the grease in hot and potash
cold with a little hot water and it has come well.
This afternoon have cut the sleeves for my stone
colour borage dress and have worked some on
the hair cloth cover for the lounge. Harriet
come into my chamber for an hour or two.
This was a fine June day for working out of doors. Old Oliver noted in his journal that “We mowed back of Kellys to day,” describing a piece of land north of their house near the ponds.
At the house, or rather, in the yard, Evelina and probably Jane McHanna made soap. As their mothers had done before them, they boiled animal fat (of which they had plenty on hand) in an iron kettle over an open fire. When ready, they “poured the grease […] hot,” into a barrel and added potash, a generic term for lye, a product that was typically obtained from wood ashes. The Ames weren’t burning wood at the house anymore, though, so where and how Evelina got her potash is uncertain. Any thoughts, readers?
Evelina had made soap before and was confident in the process. “It has come well.” However, she and countless other housewives would soon find that this skill was no longer necessary as commercial soap became available. After the Civil War, especially, manufactured soap would gradually replace homemade soap, except in the remote pockets and far reaches of the migrating frontier.
Some 750 miles to the west of Easton, in fact, in the bustling river town of Cincinnati, a candlemaker named William Procter and a soap-maker named James Gamble had been manufacturing soap for about fourteen years. Besides wanting to make a good product, they wanted to sell it to a broader market. Using the animal fats from the nearby “Porkopolis” slaughterhouses and fronting the Ohio river, they had both material and transportation right at hand. Their enterprise would succeed. Homemakers like Evelina would no longer need to stand over a hot kettle to make soap.