Odds and Ends/ August 22nd, 2021

Today we are going to be looking at some starch containers that are in the museum house and learning about their history and use. While these might not seem like very interesting items at first glance they tell quite the story!

What was starch used for?

We don’t often starch our clothing anymore, but it used to be a very common practice. The purpose of using starch was to stiffen clothing and other linens. You might have heard the phrase stiff collar before, here it has a whole other meaning!

Starch would be combined with water, either hot or cold. Hot water would result in more penetration of the materials than with cold water. You would mix you solution depending on how stiff or how much body you wanted to give your clothing.

The solution would be added to the washer with detergent during the agitation stage. After the clothing was dried you would then iron out the clothes to get the desired stiffness and to get rid of wrinkles.

Silver Gloss Starch

Here at the Homestead we have two different containers of Silver Gloss brand starch from the Edwardsburg Brand. One is a simple cardboard box which has instructions on it. The other is a very interesting piece of Ontario’s history.

Pictured to the right is a Silver Gloss Starch tin from the early 1900s. This tin was made by MacDonald Manufacturing Co., Toronto. The tin is horseshoe shaped, with a hinged lid. It features an embossed design in predominantly yellow and turquoise and includes "medallions" naming carious fair and exhibitions in Ontario and Quebec. It also has cornstalks on it. Our artifact here at O’Hara has seen better days and it is hard to make out the medallions.

Edwardsburg Brand

William Thomas Benson, from England, and Thomas Aspden, a Scot, were the owners of this company which originated in England. They opened a factory in 1858 in the village of Edwardsburg (Cardinal), Canada West, a site that offered excellent facilities for water-power and for transportation by water and rail to the markets of Montreal and Toronto.

The Edwardsburg Starch Company was the only Canadian supplier of corn and laundry starch until 1868. The tin we have at the Homestead would be dated some time after 1906, as it says it is manufactured by “The Canada Starch Company”, which was the name given to the company after they amalgamated with two of their Canadian competitors in 1906. The company is still operating to this day.

We thought this was a very interesting item and it goes to show that even the most basic of household items are important parts of our history and always have a story to tell!