CORD BED WRENCH

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.