Corn Husk Mattress

Straw doesn t have to be stuffed into a mattress cover before you can sleep on it.

Corn husk mattress. Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress. Mattress meant something totally different back in the day. This was done before the farmer or the hired man would. Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows.

Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga. In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter. 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.

Field corn was a very. 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. Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks.

A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress. Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill. Commonplace during the great depression corn husk mattresses were homemade by farm folk. 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.

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. Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses. The corn husk mattress took quite a long time to prepare. Because of the material used various vermin.

Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary. Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags.