Everyone Had A Feather Bed
In the 19th century, birds were an intimate part of daily life
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, feathers were an indispensable part of life for the vast majority of Americans. No, I don’t mean the elaborate plumes that adorned the fancy hats of fancy ladies, nor do I mean the quills used for writing until they were eclipsed by the ball-point pen. This week, we’re talking about the feathers that stuffed the beds of everyone from frontier paupers to New York robber barons. Feathers were a biological product as ubiquitous as leather, as indispensable as cotton, and as luxurious as beaver pelts.
Feathers were by no means cheap. A pound of feathers might cost a dollar in 1800 (equivalent to twenty-five dollars today), and a family might need three hundred pounds of the stuff to all sleep comfortably. Yet in spite of this cost, nearly everyone managed to gather up enough feathers to stuff a bed. “He is poor indeed, in this land of abundance, this paradise of geese, ducks, and turkeys, who cannot feather his own bed,” wrote an Indiana farmer in 1845.1
This most quotidian, most intimate, most valuable, and most universal item was crafted from the bodies of America’s birds, both wild and domesticated. Every night, most Americans were borne not on eagle’s wings, but on goose’s down. “How many millions of persons consider this one of the greatest of human luxuries!” wrote C. N. Bement in 1865. “Who can tell how many midnight watchings it has lulled into the sweetest slumbers?”2
A typical bed in 18th and 19th century America consisted of a wooden bed frame or bedstead topped by a mattress that was stuffed with corn husks, straw, or horsehair, and rested on ropes or leather straps stretched across the bedstead. On top of the mattress rested a featherbed, which was essentially a mass of 30 to 50 pounds of feathers stuffed into a bag called a tick, which was woven as tightly as possible to keep feathers from escaping. The bed would then be made with sheets, blankets, and in very cold weather, a bed rug or a feather-stuffed duvet.
While the tick holding the feathers would wear out and need to be replaced periodically, the feather stuffing might last fifty years or more. A feather bed’s owners would stuff the feathers into a new tick any time the old one wore out. People did this, sometimes over several generations, because feathers were so expensive. “Next to gunpowder,” wrote historian Harriette Arnow, “feathers were about the most expensive things on the Cumberland.”3 One 1792 record shows feathers from wild geese and swans selling for a dollar per pound, while another prices them above a gallon of whiskey. A certain William Neely sold his feather bed for 33 dollars, which was more than he got for selling three of his cows.4
Buying one new was easily the most expensive option for getting a feather bed, and it was probably the one least frequently pursued. To buy a bed, you might go to a feather bed maker like Betsy Ross, who, in addition to sewing the occasional flag, crafted feather-beds for wealthy Philadelphians.5 Mrs. Ross would have asked you to specify what grade of feathers you’d like, each at a certain price per pound, and then how full you wanted the bed. The 1861 Dictionary of Daily Wants advises against this option, however, instead suggesting that because “feathers are very expensive when bought new, it is more economical to await some favourable opportunity of purchasing them secondhand.”6 Much more frequently, people inherited them, or made a bed themselves.
When John Brockman of Louisa County, Virginia passed away in 1755, he distributed his parcels of land, horses, and blacksmith tools among his sons, some land and a looking glass to his wife, and to each of his six daughters and four sons, he left “one feather-bed and one pair of sheets.” These were the only possessions he mentioned.7 “Will after will, all up and down the Cumberland, mentions feather beds, just as do the wills of Virginia and the Carolinas,” wrote Harriette Arnow. Everyone in this era, “from the Donelsons with twenty-nine slaves to Cornelius Ruddle without a saddle, had feather beds.”8
Feather beds were so basic, you could hardly get married without one. In 19th century Texas, young men were expected to provide their wives with a nice feather pillow as part of the marriage price,9 and throughout Appalachia, “most girls of even rather poor farmers” could expect to receive a feather bed at marriage, alongside a locket, bedstead, blanket, horse, and saddle.10 “At the west, at any rate, whatever other thing is wanting, none need lack a feather bed; no girl is of a marriageable age or condition who has not earned a feather bed.”11
Not all feathers were created equal when it came to stuffing a bed. Those from pigeons and domestic chickens were considered inferior to those of wild waterfowl, while white feathers from domesticated geese fetched the highest prices. Barnyard geese, kept for their meat and eggs and to trim the grass and eat bugs from the garden, were also used, like sheep, for their down. Fortunately for these geese, gathering their feathers didn’t require sacrificing their life. In fact, as a writer in the Vermont Family Visitor expressed in 1845, “every body knows that live geese-feathers are the best,” as feathers start losing their gloss and spring as soon as a bird is killed.12
Down from the bellies, breasts and under-wings could be plucked from living geese, which the birds were guaranteed to resist vigorously.13 Plucking geese “required skill and patience as well as strength and fortitude; if unskillfully done the goose might end up with torn skin and the picker with bruises on her arms and face.” Down could be plucked from geese as often as every seven weeks,14 although some considered this to be far too frequent. “No geese can be healthy under such cruel extortion; and without health, feathers cannot be good,” wrote one Indiana farmer. “Twice a year, in spring, and mid summer, is often enough.”15
The temptation to pluck birds frequently was understandable, however. A bed required anywhere from 25 to 50 pounds of feathers. A goose’s down from a single plucking yielded only a few small handfuls, which did not weigh much. It took years to gather enough feathers to make a bed, which undoubtedly felt to new parents like starting a child’s college savings account as soon as they’re born.
In frontier communities, a feather bed was still a requirement, but a healthy stock of geese was not always guaranteed. Domesticated animals could be expensive and scarce, so settlers looked to wild birds to meet life’s necessities. Passenger Pigeons were a seemingly inexhaustible, if intermittent, resource, and colonists used them for their flesh and feathers whenever their massive flocks flew or roosted nearby. “Here is a flock that the eye cannot see the end of,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in his 1823 novel The Pioneers. “There is food enough in it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month and feathers enough to make beds for the whole country.”16 Pigeons are not especially large birds, and a small army of them had to sacrifice their lives for every pigeon-feather mattress. A small mattress and its accompanying pillows required about twenty-seven pounds of feathers,17 which might consume 1,700 pigeons.18
The market hunting of game birds like ducks and geese also produced mountains of feathers and down as a byproduct of the trade in meat. Market hunters rarely did the plucking and gutting themselves, instead hiring out locals to process the birds. These subcontractors might take home a penny per bird, or might just be paid with the feathers for their effort.19 In 1840s Texas, a pound of feathers from wild birds sold for fifty cents, and a family might need three hundred pounds — taken from three thousand ducks — to stuff all the mattresses and pillows necessary to furnish their house. By the 1850s, the wholesale trade in feathers had grown to the point that they were shipped by the half-ton bale, and these economies of scale helped cut the price of feathers in half.20
Yet despite their value and comfort, feather beds could easily turn into a smelly, lumpy mass if they weren’t properly crafted and maintained. After being plucked, feathers needed to be treated to remove their natural oil coverings before they could be placed in a feather bed. This required spreading the feathers on boards and oven-drying them in the heat, or soaking them for a few days in water mixed with quick-lime.21 Even after this work, there often remained what Harriet Beecher Stowe called “the strong odor of a new feather-bed.”22 If feathers were not sufficiently cured, or if beds were infrequently aired out, or if they were left in the sun and got too hot, the oils in quills would grow rancid and the bed would start to stink. This tendency toward putrefaction led to the understandable belief that feather beds were unhealthy.
The daily process of making a feather bed was also a real chore, although the 1871 Godey’s Lady’s Book claimed it was “excellent exercise, and promotes the health and spirits” (although it was “a remarkable fact that few servants are to be found in the present day willing to shake a feather bed”).23 Feather beds were basically just big bags of feathers. They didn’t have any internal structure or support, so sleeping on a feather bed would leave a massive indent under each body. Making the bed every morning meant lifting the bed, shaking the feathers to one side, turning it over, smoothing all the feathers out, and then carefully replacing the blankets over the bed. Sitting or leaning on the bed during the day would also leave a huge indent and ruin the smooth finish.
At the end of the 19th century, feather beds quickly lost popularity as coil-spring mattresses, packed with cotton, became commercially available. Advertisements from that era highlight why consumers were so eager to trade away their old feather beds. ACME Spring Bed Co. of Chicago promised that their feathers were “subjected to our special scientific antiseptic treatment in addition to the usual steam curing process and are guaranteed to remain forever healthful and absolutely odorless,” while their spring beds were packed with “non-absorbent antiseptic pure white cotton felt.”24 By 1913, one could read in the Country Gentleman magazine that the “old-time feather bed” has “long been a thing of the past,” a fact that “would have astonished our grandmothers, secure in their pride and delight in the possession of their ‘best’ feather beds.”25
Unlike feather beds, a coil-spring mattress was not something that could be made on a Western homestead. The growth of these manufactured products was one more instance of the transformation of the American economy into something more centralized, reliant on sterile, factory-made products ferried through supply chains by rail or truck. A mattress ordered from a Sears magazine and shipped by train was just as dependent on nature — products from plants and animals — as a homemade feather bed. But the buyer could now be fully ignorant of the hands picking the cotton and mining the ore and manufacturing the mattress, in a way that they could never ignore the down they plucked ounce by ounce from the breasts of protesting geese or lifeless pigeons to fill a 40-pound feather bed.
I’ve been pulled away from writing by a few other projects over the last couple weeks, so I’m re-sharing one of the earliest pieces I wrote, originally published in September 2023. I’ll be back next time with something new, but in the meantime, thanks for reading!
Indiana Farmer. “A Chapter on Feathers and Feather Beds.” Vermont Family Visitor. United States: n.p., 1845, p. 157.
C. N. Bement, “The Goose - Its Value - Its Usefulness, &c.” Genesee Farmer. United States: B.F. Smith & Company, 1865., p. 45.
Arnow, Harriette Louisa Simpson. Seedtime on the Cumberland. United States: University Press of Kentucky, 1983, p. 373.
Ibid.
Gold, Sunny Sea. "What Beds Were Like in 1776." Saatva. June 17, 2022.
Philip, Robert K.. The Dictionary of Daily Wants. United Kingdom: Houlston and Wright, 1861, p. 416.
Brockman, William Everett. History of the Hume, Kennedy and Brockman Families: In Three Parts. United States: Press of Chas. H. Potter, 1916, p. 180.
Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland, p. 372.
R. K. Sawyer. Texas Market Hunting, 2013, p. 29
Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland, p. 362.
Indiana Farmer. “A Chapter on Feathers and Feather Beds.”
Ibid.
Branch, Roger. “Sleeping in a Feather Bed.” Statesboro Herald. December 13, 2019.
Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland, p. 373.
Indiana Farmer. “A Chapter on Feathers and Feather Beds.”
W. B. Mershon. The Passenger Pigeon, 1907, p. 41.
Godey's Lady's Book. N.p.: L.A. Godey., 1874, p. 191.
Joel Greenberg. A Feathered River Across the Sky. 2014. p. 73-74.
Smalley, A. L. (2022). The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism, 1850–1920. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 68.
R. K. Sawyer, Texas Market Hunting, 2013, p. 36
Indiana Farmer. “A Chapter on Feathers and Feather Beds.”
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Chimney-Corner for 1866: Vii. Bodily Religion: A Sermon on Good Health.” The Atlantic, July 1866.
Godey's Lady's Book and Ladies American Magazine. United States: Godey Company, 1871, p. 275.
“ACME Hygienic Feathers.” Advertisement from ACME Spring Bed Co. The Puritan. United States: Frank Munsey, 1899.
Country Gentleman, the Magazine of Better Farming. “Feather Beds Up-to-Date.” United States. December 13, 1913, p. 1827