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Ranch House Relics: Artifacts of Life at Warner-Carrillo
Saturday Night Bath
By Kathryn Fletcher
November/December 2024
Introducing Ranch House Relics: Artifacts of Life at Warner-Carrillo, a new eNews series that takes readers into the daily lives, traditions, and tools of those who lived and worked at the Warner-Carrillo Ranch House. This month’s feature explores the ritual and resourcefulness of weekly bathing in a time before modern conveniences.
At the Warner-Carrillo Ranch House, the Saturday night bath would have been a weekly family ritual. Baths were taken in the kitchen, which was the warmest room in the house, especially during the winter months. Water was heated in pots on the stove and poured into a simple wash tub. The bather would squat in the tub, with the person responsible for bringing in and filling the tub typically bathing first. In most families, the traditional order was father, mother, then children in descending order of age. This is the origin of the old saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.” Both the Carrillo and the Taylor families were large, so you can imagine a line of children waiting their turn. The Taylors had eight children and coped with no indoor plumbing for twenty years. By the time the last person bathed, the water was quite grimy.
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Left This c. 1880s upright, folding bathtub at Warner-Carrillo Ranch House Museum is typical of the kind that waited patiently for Saturday night, when it was called into service until every family member got a bath. Right The museum’s tin tub, edged in maple, unfolds onto the kitchen floor for bathing and features an attached water tank. Photos by Kathryn Fletcher |
Before the advent of the indoor bathroom, having a folding copper or tin tub—like the tin one on display here in the ranch house kitchen was considered a luxury. While not as common as simple wooden or metal wash tubs, folding tubs stood upright, out of the way, and could be purchased in catalogs and stores by the mid- to late-19th century. These narrow tubs could be easily moved through doorways for draining, or they could be fitted with a tube to drain grey water into the vegetable garden. Shampooing was not a standard part of bathing and women would sometimes go a month without that luxury. The folding tub on display, which was donated, is a favorite artifact of our visitors.
The Saturday night bath served an important purpose: to ensure cleanliness for Sunday church services, most likely at the 1830 Chapel of Saint Francis located four miles away. Children were taught that "cleanliness is next to godliness" and Sundays were a time to socialize with other families while dressed in their clean "Sunday Best"—often a person’s only set of nice clothes. Thankfully, with the advent of indoor plumbing, these labor-intensive rituals have faded away into domestic history.
Doing laundry back then was no easy task either! But that’s a story for another day.
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