Corn Husk Mattress

The corn husk mattress took quite a long time to prepare.

Corn husk mattress.

At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair. Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill. Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags. A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress.

Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress. The guest bed was up in the attic. One thing they did not like was going out to the cornfield and pulling ears of corn from the corn stalks for the mattresses. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses.

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. Field corn was a very. Straw doesn t have to be stuffed into a mattress cover before you can sleep on it. Commonplace during the great depression corn husk mattresses were homemade by farm folk.

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. Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would. 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.

Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows. The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter.

A prosperous american of the 18th and early 19th centuries slept on a bed made up of several layers. Mattress meant something totally different back in the day.