I got to thinking about this, OK before DDT and the “modern era” of pesticides following WWII, how did people deal with things like bed bugs and roaches and such.
Now I found things like roaches and ants can be dealt with if you don’t have food. They may be there, but you don’t see a lot of them if there is no food.
But what about bed bugs? I recall old movies where they had flypaper all over the celings. And it always seems in those old comedy movies the housewife was on the chair screaming while the mouse mocked her, so it probably wasn’t unheard of to have mice.
I know one person even today, who said, “I give up” as she lives in the country and her home has too many places for mice to get in. And she says they’ll just chew another hole in. So she has learned to live with them?
I imagine with roaches and bed bugs it was easier as people didn’t have as many thigs. I mean Ralph Kramden didn’t even have any upholstered furniture for the bugs to hide in.
So anyone know any “old timers” and how they used to deal with bed bugs, roaches and other vermin in the “old days”
Before I read your era specification – based on the thread title alone – my immediate thought was, “They threw out the straw and got some fresh straw from the barn.”
According to my 77 year old mother, they used to place the legs to of the bed in jar lids with gasoline covering the bottom for bedbugs. Bedding was taken out of doors and aired out in the sunshine. Roaches they just lived with.
They got bit. And wasn’t there a scene in a movie about taking a damp bar of soap, pulling back the covers really fast and smacking the bedbugs with the soap so they got stuck in it?
I remember watching 1900 House. The people who were living in a Victorian home as though the were in 1900. At one point the wife hires a maid-of-all-work and for her spring cleaning expects her to take the bed completely apart, scrub it done with boiling water, beat the mattress and reassemble the whole thing.
I live in the country. I haven’t used pesticides in ages, but I don’t have roaches or bedbugs. I have spiders, but I don’t mind them too much. I get the occasional mice, but I also have cats. I do use flea meds on the animals, though. that may be cheating. But fleas don’t bite me, and they do drive the pets crazy.
I have lived in the same house in Houston for 20 years at this point, and have never used pesticides in the house. I have trapped mice. We have no roach or ant problems.
The answer is scrupulous housekeeping. As you noted, no food - no vermin.
OTOH, I have used exterior pesticides for termites (spot treatment via bait traps), and if we ever get bedbugs, the DDT would come out in a second.
What do you mean by the Old Days? When I was a kid (and I won’t say how long ago that was) we killed roaches by scaring them out from behind the refrigerator with some poison and then swatting them. To me, it was hilarious loads of fun to hear my father say “Say your prayers, Mr. Cockroach” before the swatter hit.
For rats (Yeah, there were a lot of those too) we used an old invention called a cat, though my sister once wrote a magic spell to get rid of them. It worked for a little while, but then we decided the health department was more effective.
Keating’s Powder (of which the active ingredient was pyrethrum) was a standard for bugs and fleas in the 19th c. Sulphur candles were burned to kill or drive out pests (rather dangerous to life by modern standards)
*Keating’s powder does the trick,
Kills all Bugs and Fleas off quick;
Keating he’s a jolly brick.
Bravo! long live Keating!*
I’d imagine ‘kerosene’ rather than ‘gasoline’ was what she’d used.
I read that roaches eat bedbugs, so perhaps killing the roaches encouraged the bedbug epidemic.
I suspect that before central haeting, you would jsut let the house get cold in the winter-a few days of freezing temperatures would kill most of the bugs.
While it’s true, it doesn’t happen in real life. Roaches are after your food and they don’t tend to go where there isn’t food. Bed bugs are after your blood. So the roaches tend to stay in the kitchen and the bed bugs stay in the bedroom
Freezing doesn’t kill bugs unless you do it for a long time. Both roaches and bed bugs would require two weeks of below 32ºF to die off. And it’s easy to find pockets of warmth. So most would simply hide in a box or wall where the temp wouldn’t fall that low. PCOs do use freezing but those temps are extremely low.
They did this in resturaunts where I worked as you can do this as the kitchen staff works cause the extreme cold only effects a small part and it kills quick and then returns to normal
My WAG, but it would probably take a couple of days for the gasoline to evaporate. And nobody was killed in my mom’s house by smoking in a bed with fuel at the bottom of the legs.
My aunties swear garlic consumed as food not strung around as sachets will keep most vermain away from people. I know at least one or two things I eat on any given day have garlic in them. We’ve never had bed bugss.
There’s a similar scene to the soapball one. The family lives “on the dole” in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s and they receive a free mattress from St. Vincent de Paul Society, and it’s crawling in bedbugs. They drag it back to exchange for a better one and are treated like shiftless ungrateful trash (which the father of the family, Malachy, pretty much is). IIRC he also mentions the kerosene filled saucers, the problem with that method being that fleas and other tiny bugs can jump.
I have no idea where I originally heard this, but IIRC, back in the really old days, floors and beds would be strewn with dried lavender, wormwood and other herbs with insect-deterring properties prior to a thorough sweep and a beating of mattresses.
:: goes away to check old herbal tomes to find verification of her so-called ‘facts’ ::
I’ve read that in Tudor era England (and probably Europe as well) people would sometimes keep a bloodstained rag in their pocket (not necessarily their own blood) to attract the fleas away from the fur on their clothing.
