Grandmothers made/created their own washing soaps.

Several Groesbeck cousins are collaborating to transcribe and annotate great great grandmother Elizabeth Thompson Groesbeck's journal. In the course of gathering materials, cousin Karen M discovered the following recipes and receipts among her Grandfather Nicholas Groesbeck Morgan's papers:

These licenses and recipes belonged to Elizabeth Groesbeck

 and assured her rights to create and use the compounds.

Securing soap recipes in this manner was not unusual in Elizabeth's time.

(1820-1883)

G. W. Jackson and Company's Universal Washing Compound. The Baltimore company issued these certificates as a way to cut down on the infringement of their formula, which is included on this imprint dating from 1867. 

 Elizabeth's Family Right was dated February 1, 1868.

My Grandma Emily Rufi Frazier (1886-1972) was a famous soap maker. After our family moved from her Woodruff, Utah home in 1951 she continued to make and supply our family with her soap. I remember it as a dirty milk color. She set her boiled and brewed concoction in 9 x 13 dripper pans. After they set up she cut the soap into squares. My parents washed our laundry with those bars of soap. Upon the advent of the automatic washing machine, they shaved the bars and continued to use the soap to wash our clothes.

Emily and her descendants swore by her soap’s effectiveness to clean their clothes. I was trying to recall the smell of the soap. I can only come up with the smell of “clean.” That’s amazing when you think we collected drippings from bacon and mutton tallow in separate cans we kept on the back of the stove. They were not to be mixed for some reason I don’t remember. They were used to make grandma’s soap. Ashes and lye were the other two ingredients I am aware of. Whenever we’d travel to Woodruff, which was rather frequent, we’d take our cans of grease to Grandma. She’d send home bags of her soap whenever she finished a new batch, with whomever was traveling to Salt Lake City.

That's Emily's automatic washing machine in the front left corner of her kitchen. 

Her sons Elmer and Glenn Frazier, seated to the left, appear to be watching

 their wives and mother work at the kitchen sink

 and drainboard in the mid 1960's.

My parents, Glenn and Helen Rex Frazier (1913-1982), and I, 

used a twin tub wringer washing machine to do the family wash in the 1950's.

This 1961 photo is of Helen hanging up her clothes

 on the backyard umbrella clothes lines.

White whites was extremely important to Helen.