I Googled and found many references to cast iron sinks (including the notice 'Cast Iron Sinks' in a plumbers' merchant with a man looking at the notice and exclaiming, "Any fool knows that!").
They are still made in many styles - and very fashionable apparently. The name associated with them all seems to be Kohler, I think it must be an American phenomenon but it was very interesting. I've not seen any in Britain or in British folk museums. I'll ask Spouse, he was a ferrous metallurgist in another life.
Four rooms isn't so tiny though, our first house, shere we had three children, was one up and down, no garden or yard even, straight onto the street, lavatory yard four houses away. A family living in the same street had five children and a poor girl at the end in an older, even smaller house, had twin babies in the 1962/3 hard winter when they had to use stand pipes for water and their roof blew off :-( We didn't have a copper, I had to boil water to wash nappies on the gas stove and wring them by hand and hang them out in the street or round the fire. Woollens were washed in the sink, other clothes taken to that modern facility the launderette and sheets went to the bagwash.
No just a saying because it was so far away. LOL Not to be visited in the dark, scary for a young child. No bagwash there. A very rural country village. One shop and a post office. Nine farms. Shirley
I totally agree with you Lee. There was a report on radio last week when they were discussing these super bugs that are found in hospitals. They found that if they go back to the old methods of using dilute bleach and scrubbing the floors etc. in hospitals it gets rid of MRSA and other nasties like that.
Ours wasn't scary although during the war we weren't allowed to use a torch. During the night we used the gazunda.
So it WAS romantic then :-)
I'd never heard of a bagwash until we went to live in that house, I'd hardly ever strayed out of the parish. Neighbours told me about it when they saw me hanging out hand washed sheets across the street :-)
"Mary Fisher" wrote in news:46851901$0$758$ snipped-for-privacy@master.news.zetnet.net:
Up until the 1800s in the US, most water pipes were made of hollowed trees. Cast iron pipe imported from England had one of its first installations in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. By the early 1800s, cast iron production began domestically in New Jersey. In 1848, the National Public Health Act was passed creating a plumbing code for the US.
Almost simultaneously in 1883, both the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company (now American Standard) and Kohler began the process of enameling cast iron bathtubs to form a smooth interior surface. Kohler?s first clawfoot tub was advertised as a ?horse trough/hog scalder, when furnished with four legs will serve as a bathtub.? These tubs soon became mass-produced as they were recognized as having an extremely sanitary surface that was easy to clean, thus preventing the spread of bacteria and diseases. The end of World War I brought with it a construction boom in the US. Bathrooms were fitted with a toilet, sink, and bathtub ? mostly clawfoot bathtubs. But even in 1921, only one percent of homes in the US had indoor plumbing. Outhouses were still the norm in rural America. The Sears catalog, with its uncoated, absorbent pages, was a popular form of toilet paper often found hanging inside the outhouse.
Over time, the once popular clawfoot tub morphed into a built- in tub with apron front. This enclosed style afforded much easier maintenance of the bathroom and with the emergence of colored sanitary ware, more design options for the homeowner. It was Crane Company that introduced colored bathroom fixtures to the US market in 1928.
what the transcribed article doesn't mention is that those colored bathroom fixtures were mostly enamel over cast iron though. i'll have to go search my old house references, but i believe the use of ceramic for toilets & sinks happened around WWII, as iron was diverted to the war effort. lee
"Mary Fisher" wrote in news:46851c63$0$22489$ snipped-for-privacy@master.news.zetnet.net:
i know. and what modern anti-bacterials don't kill directly, they allow to live & mutate into more resistant bacteria. not all bacteria *needs* to be killed. one needs a certain amount of 'bad bacteria' challange to one's immune system, or it doesn't work properly. toddlers just starting preschool (here at least) are always ill because they're suddenly being exposed to quantities of bacteria they haven't encountered before. lee
I'm not saying they were unheard-of, just that in the cheap mass housing that we rented in Harrogate they weren't standard; the kitchen sink had a sort of Y-connector between the hot & cold taps, and if you held your hand under the stream of water it would get scalded on one side and frozen on the other.
The general attitude among our British acquaintances seemed to be that you'd put in mixer taps from the DIY yourself if you wanted them ... like having to buy plugs for your small appliances.
So do I. I horrified a city-bred friend once when we were out for a walk by pulling off honeysuckle blossoms and sucking the nectar out of the end. As Pig-pen said to Lucy, "This is good CLEAN dirt!"
The only source is the polyphant quarry in Cornwall, I've recently tracked down the owner, by pure serendipity, and he sold us some small offcuts which are ideal for our purpose (making spindle whorls and moulds for a pewter item). Wetting it can keep down dust but Spouse wears a mask and has his suction hose running close to where he's working.
Ha! Like bathing in the water of a hot spring in Iceland. We'd sit next to a freezing cold stream and a very hot one and they wouldn't mix! To walk to the stream we had to go through bitterly cold water, treading on extremely hot gravel. It was weird - but everything in Iceland is! A wonderful country ...
I've never seen any cheap mass housing in Harrogate though, we're in Leeds,
15 miles away, and I know Harrogate well.
I've not heard that. What stone have I been living under? LOL!
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