Forget Me Not

This post is going to take us a little bit away from our normal description of artifacts and talk about something else - dungeons!  Usually when we think of dungeons we think of some dark, sinister place underground far beneath a castle.  But did you know that dungeons also existed in many early jails?  Our own Kings Co. Jail at the Kings Co. Museum had a dungeon!

The picture you see below is the hatch in the floor where prisoners were put when they were being a little too much trouble.  It is just a dark hole - not even room to stand, no light, no fresh air, a prisoner could barely turn around.  Most visitors to the jail don't even notice the hatch until you point it out to them.  The thought of putting a living person in there is, well, very creepy.  The purpose was to inflict maximum psychological damage on a prisoner.  Fortunately this type of punishment was eventually outlawed and remains part of our hidden histories.

The Ice In My House

Can you image life without a refrigerator and freezer? What would we do without our Costco size rack of ribs? Well, since the refrigerator didn’t come around until the 1930s, what did people do?  Some relief came in the mid 1800s when a little invention called the icebox made its appearance. 

Iceboxes had hollow walls lined with zinc or tin.  Just as some houses used to be insulated with seawood, so did these iceboxes.  It could also be insulated with sawdust, cork, or straw.  A large block of ice was placed in a tray located in the top compartment of the icebox.  Since cool air descends, the cold air from the ice would glide down the sides of the ice box to keep veggies, fruit, meat, and milk cool on the hot summer days.  Ice was cut from rivers and stored in ice houses and the Ice Man would make door-to-door deliveries of blocks of ice.

 

The icebox was a great invention and it revolutionized the way we now store food.   In fact, some researchers believe it had a direct contribution to lower infant mortality rates during the summer months.  Some ice boxes were quite fancy and made an attractive addition to the family’s furniture.

 

Now you know why some people today still call the fridge the “ice box.”  If you remember the ice box, or remember hearing stories about them, we’d love to have you comment on this piece!

Plugging Away

Plug tobacco is a kind of chewing tobacco, something that was very popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The handle on the one in this picture is almost 15" (38cm) long with an almost 4.5" (11cm) blade.  It's fairly heavy.

General stores had tobacco cutters so they could easily cut pieces of the bulk form of the pressed tobacco leaves for customers.  This one has a raised imprint on it that says "Enterprise M.F.G. Co. Philadelphia" as well as "Pat. July 25, 1871, Jan. 20, 1885."  Chewing tobacco was so popular that in 1938, RJ Reynolds, manufacturer of the popular Camel cigarette, had 12 brands of smoking tobacco and 84 brands of chewing tobacco.

In fact, it was so popular that "spittoons" were placed in public areas so tobacco chewers had someplace to spit.  Even some church pews were fitted with spittoons!  I guess the parish didn't like having all that spit on their floors.  But, smoke or spit - both seem like good habits not to develop! 

To Lunch or Not To Lunch

Summer’s almost over and school is starting for another year!  One of the hardest parts of getting back into the school routine is trying to figure out what to have for lunch each day.  Today there are lots of choices – schools have hot lunch programs, cafeterias, some are located in areas where students can go buy their lunch at a restaurant, and of course, you can always bring your own.

That’s what made me marvel at the little lunch pail currently on display in our jail.  It’s really small, measuring just 7.8cm (3”) high and 15.5cm (6”) long.  In fact, in the picture below you can see a ball point pen at the bottom of it.  That gives you an idea of just how small this lunch pail is. 

This metal pail is from around the 1880s and belonged to a student called Evelyn.  Lunch was usually home made bread with home-made butter, or home-made jelly or jam.  It was a real treat if students had peanut butter!  It wasn’t often students had meat in their sandwiches; many parents could not afford to buy lunch meats like we eat today.  Some memories of school day lunches include fried-egg sandwiches, mustard sandwiches, mashed potato sandwiches, and lettuce sandwiches.

Lunch pails have evolved to lunchboxes over the years with many different designs and colours.  As a kid, we weren’t allowed to have a new lunchbox every year so I can remember being very excited when the old one wore out and I was allowed to choose a new one!  My favourite had horses – kind of like the one below.

I wonder what today’s students would think if they could only eat what could fit inside this little pail? What was your favourite lunchbox?