Corn Husk Mattress

Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress.

Corn husk mattress.

Mattress meant something totally different back in the day. 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. Field corn was a very. One thing they did not like was going out to the cornfield and pulling ears of corn from the corn stalks for the mattresses.

Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would. Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary.

A prosperous american of the 18th and early 19th centuries slept on a bed made up of several layers. 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. At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair. Straw doesn t have to be stuffed into a mattress cover before you can sleep on it.

The corn husk mattress took quite a long time to prepare. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows. Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks. The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day.

Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga. A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress. 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. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter.

Because of the material used various vermin. A loose heap seems very comfortable compared with sleeping on a hard floor or you can put the straw into a wooden bed with sides like the danish one illustrated below left or this polish bed.