PUTTING UP
AN OLD CORD BED
APRIL 1914
Agony was the
word. The job required the services of at least two, three will be
better,
husky men and
is an athletic feat beside which a wrestling match is child's play.
A 'bed wrench'
was found at a second hand curiosity shop and took the finder back
to his
boyhood days
immediately.
Don't know
what a 'bed wrench' is? Of course you don't, nobody, born this
century does, and that is because they never had to 'put up' a cord
bed stead, nor, having had the privilege of sleeping in the 'bed' it
held.
Next to
putting up the wood stove pipe, or, laying the carpet, having to use
a flat iron to drive the leather head tacks, the assembling of a
cord bedstead of our granddads time, called for the most peremptory
giving of all Christian virtues a vacation until the job is doe.
The cord
bedstead was a joy and the favorite bedstead in those days. There
are four post, of any height or girth to suit the person or his
pocketbook. Anywhere, repeat 'anywhere', from three to four feet
from the floor a hole was bored in two sides of each post facing
each other when the footboard and headboard post are stood up to be
connected. The holes were bored with a thread to take the screw out
on the ends of the connecting pieces at the sides and ends of the
bedstead.
These
connecting pieces were round and on what was to be the top of them
when the bedstead was set up was a row of 'pegs' shaped like so
many mushrooms. A hole about an inch in diameter run through each of
the four connecting pieces . When the bedstead was assembled by the
fitting of the connecting pieces into the holes in the post and
screwed up tight and in place by means o a stout sti9ck thrust
through the holes in the round pieces , the bed was ready to be
'corded up' . This is where
he 'wrench'
came into play.
The bed wrench
was something like a stout wooden hand vise. The cord, a rope like
clothesline
but of good
quality, was run around the mushroom like pegs which are a few
inches apart , lengthwise and crosswise from connecting piece to
connecting piece, like a big meshed net.
The cord could
not be drawn taut enough by hand only, so the biggest, srtongest.
Meanest, person among the group , grabbed the 'wrench' , tangled it
up somewhere, repeat somewhere, in a part of the cord where the
tautening up process was to begin and by persistent leverage around
and about the bedstead at last wrenched the cord into a condition of
satisfactory tautness.
Here the
tumult ended. Now don't go away with the idea the work of the
setting up of the
cord bedstead
was accomplished with the ease and the brief time it takes to tell
about it. It generally required two or three capable men to tackle
the job in any hope of succeeding with it , for in the way
of refractory
disposition and demoniacal perversity the cord bedstead of the old
days had the breechey cow in the garden skinned by a mile.
It has been
known that the good wife has taken the children to the root cellar
while the old man and his help were dallying with the cord bedstead
in an effort to set it up, giving their opinion of it as it wobbled
and slid and careened and skidded at tense and critical stages of
the getting of it together.
Then, when it
was all up good and solid, mother would come in the room and put the
straw
tick on the web
of the bed cord. The tick had a large slit where we filled it with
fresh rye straw until it looked like balloon ready to take off.
Then tumbled upon the straw tick was the feather bed, two or three
feet high, with swelling fluff of geese feathers into which you
buried yourself out of sight after climbing in bed. Next the
sheets, blankets, quilt and comforter , big bulbous pillows, bed was
ready.
That's what a
bed wrench is and that is the cord bedstead it wrenched.
Source:
Article in Delaware Pilot, 3 April 1914 , by New York Sun / abstract
by Harrison Howeth.
