Corn Shuck Mattress

Field corn was a very important crop on those childhood farms and to go to.

Corn shuck mattress. Click on the photo above to see it in a larger size this is the caption on the photo above. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter. Shuck definition a husk or pod as the outer covering of corn hickory nuts chestnuts etc.

Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks. Posts about corn shuck mattress written by furtherglory. The name palliasse applies particularly to a mattress used on its own without a featherbed or solid bedstead.

Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga. The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day. Using a straw mattress under a softer woollen or feather one was quite common by the 19th century but it was a luxury in the 15th.

This was done before the farmer or the hired man would. 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. One thing they did not like was going out to the cornfield and pulling ears of corn from the corn stalks for the mattresses.

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