Someone asked me the other day, “If you could go back 150 years, what would be the first things you would notice?”
It took me about two seconds to come up with an answer—because I’ve sometimes thought it would be interesting to be able to go back as an invisible observer of the past.
“Color,” I said. “And smells.”
“And the water would kill us.”
The images with which we are most familiar are all one-dimensional and black and white. Take that picture of great-great-grandfather and grandmother and imagine what a shock it would be to meet them on the street, in three dimensions, their flesh the same color as yours, eyes (perhaps) the same color as yours, hair—-well it might be the same color but it also might be pretty greasy with the men and not particularly clean with the women.
And they likely would have an odor about them, especially if you met them at this time of year. Stale sweat for one. Showers were unknown in most homes (indoor plumbing of any kind). Bathtubs were not as well-used as our tubs and showers are now. Underarm deodorant was nonexistent. Mum was the first underarm deodorant, and it didn’t come along until 1888, a paste applied under the arms, by hand. Deodorant, not anti-perspirant.
Underwear probably went a few days before changing.
In those days, if everybody stank, nobody stank.
Last year, I was on the town square in Springfield, Illinois and I noticed a sign on one of the historic buildings denoting it as the former home of the Corneau and Diller Drug Store. The sign said the store had been opened in 1849 by Roland W. Diller and Charles S. Corneau, who installed a big wood stove circled by chairs, making the pace a popular place for mento gather and swap stories or discuss events of the day including politics, a subject that was appealing to Abraham Lincoln, whose law office was a short walk away.
Wife Mary purchased toiletries there “such as bear’s oil, ox, marrow, ‘French Chalk’ for her complexion, a patent hairdressing called ‘Zylobalsam,’ and ‘Mrs. Allen’s Restorative.”
It continues: “Because daily bathing was not yet customary, the Lincolns—like most other people—bought cologne by the quart!”
Visitors to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City can purchase 1856 French Perfume. It’s not the real stuff that was found when the boat was excavated but it is a reproduction. The museum sent a bottle of some of the real stuff to a laboratory in New York that did a chemical analysis and reproduced the perfume.
It’s strong stuff. But for hundreds of years, perfume often was not the olfactory decoration and attraction that it is today; it was a masking agent sometimes poured on and sometimes used to soak kerchiefs that were kept up the sleeves and used to waft away some personal unpleasantness of a companion.
So color and odor would be the first things to jolt us if we went back 150 years.
But the smells would not be confined to the people you meet on the streets. The streets themselves would be pretty rank.
The New York Almanack published an article a couple of years ago observing that the city had 150,000 to 200,000 horses, each of which produced “up to 30 pounds of manure per day and a quart of urine…over 100,000 tons a year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine.”
“By the end of the 19th century, vacant lots around New York City housed manure piles that reached 40 or 60 feet high. It was estimated that in a few decades, every street would have manure piled up to third story levels.”
Jefferson City’s streets didn’t produce that much manure and urine. But New York’s problems were the problems of every city in the country, including the capital city.
The manure on the dirt streets (such as High Street in Jefferson City) attracted flies by the thousands, millions. New York once estimated that three-billion flies were hatched from street poop every day. They were disease carriers. The dust from the streets and the dried manure mingled in the air, was inhaled and worn on the clothing.
And when it rained in the summer or when the show thawed in the winter, the streets turned into a gluey muck that was tracked into every business and home in town—except for the ones that required footwear to be removed before or upon entering—at which point socks that weren’t changed daily added their own atmosphere to life.
These conditions led to the rise in some communities of a new institution—the country club. People needed a place in the country where they could breathe clean air, at least for a day or two. Golf courses and horse-racing tracks developed outside of towns.
Missouri Governor Herbert Hadley, who suffered from a lung disease—pleurisy—bought a farm west of town and several prominent residents gathered one weekend for a big barn raising and cabin-building. Later, a nine-hole golf course was created and thus was born the Jefferson City Country Club.
Sanitary sewer systems were rare. Homes had outhouses, often not far from the well that provided the house with water.
If we went back 150 years and took a drink of the water of the day, we probably would choke on the taste and if we dank a little too much, we might just die of a water-borne disease. Even with natural immunity that residents of those times developed, the average life expectancy in the United States in 1880 was 40, a good part of it because of high infant mortality and primitive obstetrics that led to high mortality rates for women giving birth.
We forget how tough, how strong, our ancestors had to be to survive in such an environment. The Missouri State Penitentiary kept a log of every Confederate prisoner it took in. The average prisoner was 5-feet-7 and weighed 140 pounds. Women prisoners averaged 4-feet-11.
Imagine wearing a wool uniform, marching ten or 20 miles a day carrying a heavy rifle and a 50-pound backpack, eating unrefrigerated rations and drinking whatever water you could find, even if it was downstream from a cattle farm.
The good old days weren’t very good. The problem with going back to them is that we might not live long enough to return.
