In-house generators and steam machines survive here and there: the Cascade Laundry, in Brooklyn, New York, for instance, generates its own electricity using a natural-gas engine and keeps a Skinner Unaflow steam engine standing by for emergencies.

And the IRS still includes "steam laundry" as an industry category.

A 1900-type steam engine was large, hot, and noisy. Also, it required one or more boilers and facilities for removal of ash, if coal-fired. So, a laundry’s engine and boiler would be isolated in a separate room or even a separate building.

From the engine, a belt drove a system of “line-shafting” which distributed power to washers, extractors, mangles, and so on.

Usually, line-shafting hung from the ceiling. The hum of the overhead shafts and the slapping of the forest of belts provided a rhythmic accompaniment to the day’s activities. However, since dust and lubricants frequently dropped from the bearings and pulleys, it was recommended that laundries place it below the floor. Few did.

The dollar isn’t what it used to be, and Laundry Today readers will not be surprised to learn that laundry wages of a hundred years ago sound very low by today’s standards. But so do prices. The lists below are interesting, both for the dollar amounts and for the job titles and garments that made up the laundry trade at the turn of the last century.

But dirt goes on forever. As long as it does, the laundry will occupy an important role in the industrial picture.

If today’s Laundry Manager could peek into a laundry of 100 years ago, he or she would probably find much that is strange, along with a lot that is familiar. For laundries had already come a long way since 1832 when a Mrs. Steel founded, in New York, what is probably the world’s earliest true commercial laundry.

Mrs. Steel was followed by others: The Troy (New York) Laundry -first of many Troy laundries nationwide, The Cambridge (Massachusetts) Laundry in 1840, the Boston and Roxbury Laundry in 1847, the Contra Costa Laundry (Oakland, California) in 1849, eventually one of the largest in the west.

Mrs. Hannah Montague revolutionized the laundry industry when she lightened her washdays by disassembling her husband's shirts, so she could wash the shirt bodies less often than the collars and cuffs.

Men's shirt makers took up the idea and it became the usual practice for a century or more. Collars, cuffs, and shirt bodies became the principal targets of the laundry trade by the late ‘90’s. (There were detachable collars and cuffs for ladies, too, but women tended to wash their own garments). Important hotels and restaurants had small on-premises laundries.

Troy was then the manufacturing center for collars and cuffs, which is why one of the earliest laundries was established there.

Incidentally, detachable collars and cuffs were not the only way of cutting laundering costs. There were also the well known celluloid, and even steel, collars and cuffs...all designed for easy cleaning with a damp cloth. Paper disposables were available too.

Pressing shirt collars, cuffs, and bodies was intricate work, compared to washing them. Laundries that did this eventually became known as "custom laundries" to distinguish them from the newer and rarer "flatwork laundries" which employed mangles (flatwork ironers) to handle the simpler bedsheets, tablecloths, and the like. But a mangle was costly, and laundry owners were cautious about expanding into that line.

Some laundries did considerable business in laundering and pressing new shirts for the manufacturer before they went out for sale. Also, many users would return their shirts, collars, and cuffs regularly to the manufacturers’ chosen laundries for what they considered extra-special professional treatment.

In about 1900, James E. Kelso, a Rochester, New York, laundry owner said, "...Shirts will bear close attention, for that is where our bread is buttered. In fact, it is the solid bread with many of us, and the butter is what we can squeeze out of socks, handkerchiefs, etc."

Kelso also described an 1880’s laundry. It had four stationary tubs. Six girls, at about $1 each per day, did the washing, starching, and ironing. A stove made hot water. A boy went on foot to pick up and deliver bundled shirts and collars. It was usual at that time for women to work in the washroom, and for men to do hand ironing...almost the opposite of today’s practices.

Originally, customers came to the plant for pickup and delivery. If not, horse-drawn wagons or pedaled tricycles served the purpose. This could be grueling work. A Brooklyn laundryman described a route that required up to 20 hours. Some laundries did not finish work until late Saturday. And then it had to be delivered: customers expected clean linen for Sunday wear!

In 1904, the National Laundry Journal carried an advertisement for something new: the Rambler Auto Delivery Wagon. The Rambler notwithstanding, the 1912 laundrymen's convention still featured a veterinarian as a key speaker. Along with advising his listeners about unscrupulous horse traders and proper equine diet, he opined that, "The auto truck will not take the place of the horse."

Within a year, however, the Crown Laundry of Louisville was entirely motorized; seven trucks replaced eight horses and wagons.

Originally, most operations were true "hand laundries", and they were important industries. So much so, that they even had labor troubles. As early as 1834, for example, workers in a number of these establishments struck against a management of "laundresses." Obviously, Mrs. Steel was not the only entrepreneurial woman in the laundry industry.

But the “up to date” laundry of 1900 was largely mechanized. This naturally had its pros and cons. One expert, C. A. Royce, writing in 1904, discussed these: “I think that...laundry machinery is admirably adapted to its work, [yet] machine methods as a whole...are more wearing than the old-fashioned methods. ...There is another reason why laundry work wears out more rapidly than in the early days...‘The demand of patrons’. Laundry work of the [hand laundry] days would not pass muster today. The average...customer nowadays...demands more than cleanness, stiffness, and gloss. He demands...[that] every trace of dirt, spot or stain [be] eradicated...bleach and sour...[for] a snowy white, and then just the right tint of blue.”

Back then, a shirt was laundered for about a dime. Yet the amount of work and number of steps involved seem phenomenal now. D. H. Benjamin, a prominent laundryman, wrote instructions for ironing a shirt, less collars and cuffs. It took 8,800 words (about six times the length of this entire article)!

And starching preceded ironing. Jack London wrote of it in his novel “Martin Eden.” Says London, we "Starched 200 white shirts, with a single gathering movement seizing a shirt so that the wristbands, neckband, yoke and bosom protruded beyond the circling right hand. The left hand held up the body of the shirt so that it would not enter the starch, and at the same moment the right hand dipped into the starch--starch so hot that in order to wring it out, their hands had to be thrust, and thrust continually, into a bucket of cold water."

The laundry of a century ago, and into the 1920’s, was generally called a "steam" laundry. Steam entered the title because, as machinery began to be used for washing, extracting, and ironing, the natural next step was to power the plant by a steam engine. (Many plants were already using steam to heat water and the drying cabinets, while public utilities, providing electric light and power for motors, were few and far between.)