Because of the material used various vermin.
Corn husk mattress.
Sometimes people simply stuffed dried husks into fabric bags.
Mattress meant something totally different back in the day.
A prosperous american of the 18th and early 19th centuries slept on a bed made up of several layers.
The guest bed was up in the attic.
A simple rope bed complete with a corn husk mattress.
This was done before the farmer or the hired man would.
Sleeping on a corn husk mattress could make a body weary.
In september after the children had come home from school grandma would assign chores for each daughter.
Field corn was a very.
One thing they did not like was going out to the cornfield and pulling ears of corn from the corn stalks for the mattresses.
The corn husk mattress took quite a long time to prepare.
Or chaff leaves husks rushes palliasses.
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.
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.
Next came a big featherbed for comfort plus feather filled bolsters and pillows.
At the bottom was a simple firm mattress pad or cushion filled with corn husks or horsehair.
Others went to greater lengths shredding the husks to form a coarse fiber fill.
The husks are gathered as soon as they are ripe and on a clean dry day.
Homemakers who could not afford mass produced mattresses made covers of cotton fabric and stuffed them with dried corn husks.
Conventional mattresses are hardly sustainable here i share my experiences with making and sleeping on a straw mattress.
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.
Upstairs at the william harris homestead monroe ga.