Soapsuds Row: The Army Laundresses of the Frontier Forts

A park ranger in period dress shows a young visitor how laundry was done at Fort Larned. NPS

Every Army post of the Indian Wars era had a corner called soapsuds row, suds row or sudsville, where the company laundresses lived and worked. Most mornings found them hauling heavy buckets to fill big washtubs, or carrying firewood to heat the water. They worked all year, in every kind of weather, sometimes under a rough shed or a tent, often in the open.

Officers' wives usually come first in stories of women on frontier posts. The laundresses are mostly forgotten — yet they did valuable work, and held a position no other civilian on the post had.

The only women the Army counted

Did you not know that women are not reckoned in at all at the War Department?

Second Lieutenant Jack Summerhayes put the question to his new wife, Martha, and it summed up the Army's attitude. Apart from company laundresses, every woman on a post — officers' wives included — fell under "camp followers": civilians with no official standing, there by the commander's permission. Officers' wives were the "first ladies of the post," but some resented it. Libbie Custer, wife of George A. Custer, wrote in Boots and Saddles:

It seemed strange to me that with all the value...placed on the presence of the women of an officer's family at the frontier posts, the book of army regulations makes no provision for them, but in fact ignores them entirely!

The regulations did mention one class of women: the laundresses.

Terms of service

Soldiers didn't have to use the laundress, though most did. Private Adolph Hunnius, at Fort Larned in 1867, writes several times in his diary of washing his own clothes — probably to save the fee.

Wash day

The pay was good; the work was brutal. Lucy Williamson's A Guide for Army Laundresses sets out the routine:

1. Wash in the first tub in warm water — hot for whites.
2. Move the wash to the second tub to soak in hot water.
3. Lift it out to drain on a blanket or in a basket.
4. Empty the first tub, refill it with warm water, and rinse, stirring with a stick or ladle.
5. Wring everything out and hang it on the line.

Every piece came out of the tub heavy and dripping — no spin cycle — and the "washing" itself meant scrubbing each item with lye soap on a washboard. Most of the time, the laundresses made the soap themselves.

Home on suds row

The Army housed laundresses in anything from tents to wooden shacks to adobe buildings with brush roofs. At Fort Larned their quarters were two adobe buildings behind the enlisted barracks, built in 1860, with roofs of brush, hay and earth:

When the Army rebuilt most of Fort Larned in sandstone after the Civil War, the laundresses got nothing new. After the railroad replaced the Santa Fe Trail in 1872 and the garrison shrank, they moved into the east barracks.

More than washing

Laundresses also cooked and kept house part-time for officers' families, and did their laundry; some baked pies and bread to sell. They acted as midwives and nurses. In 1876, Gen. J. C. Kelton told the House Committee on Military Affairs that laundresses had often "afforded the only assistance on post when death or childbirth occurred in the officers' family."

"A rough lot," or "ladies in every sense of the word"

Opinions differed. Some officers and soldiers saw laundresses as quarrelsome troublemakers, others as honest, hard-working women; like the soldiers, they behaved according to their personalities and circumstances. They came from everywhere — the United States, Ireland, England, Canada, Germany, Holland, Norway, France, Scandinavia and Italy. After 1866, when African Americans could serve in the regular Army, Black laundresses were hired for their units — and one of the new Black cavalry units was at Fort Larned from 1867 to 1869, so Black laundresses lived and worked there too. Some Native American women were hired as well.

The end of an era

In 1876 a general order stopped laundresses from traveling with the troops, though those married to soldiers kept traveling, and washing, until their husbands' enlistments ran out. The official end came in 1883, when the Commissary Department lost its authority to issue them rations.

For some seventy years these tough women traveled with the troops, washed their clothes and shared their hardships. The work was hard and the housing poor, but many welcomed a job that paid well and took them to places they would never otherwise have seen.

Sources

Based on "The Army Laundress," Fort Larned National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Gen. Kelton's words are from 1876 testimony to Congress; the wash-day steps from Lucy Williamson's A Guide for Army Laundresses are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.