#013: We The People - Part 1

We The People: The Ones Who Kept Us Clean

This year, America turns 250 years old.

I've been thinking about that number for a while now. A quarter of a millennium. And I kept asking myself what, if anything, that milestone has to do with what I do for a living. Why would a laundromat owner care about the 250th anniversary of his country?

It took me a few weeks to find the answer. But when I found it, it changed the way I think about this entire industry.

I went looking for the history of laundry in America. Not the version you get from a Google search or an industry trade magazine. I went to primary sources. Letters archived at the Library of Congress. Pension records in the National Archives. Eyewitness accounts from people who were there in 1776, doing the same work our teams (and you) do today.

What I found is a couple stories that nobody in the laundromat industry has ever told. And as we celebrate this nation's 250th birthday, I think it's time we told it.

The Year Was 1776

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, laundry was an all-day, full-body affair. There were no machines. No detergent. No running water indoors. If you wanted clean clothes, you hauled water from a well or a creek. You made your own soap by boiling animal fat with lye, which was made by running water through wood ash. You soaked your clothing in a bucking tub, scrubbed it by hand, beat it with a wooden paddle, boiled it in a copper kettle, wrung it out, and hung it on a fence or a bush to dry. Then you heated a cast iron flat iron by fire and pressed everything.

That was one load.

Colonial Williamsburg's records show that the Governor's Palace laundry inventory at the time included three washing tubs, three rinsing tubs, two pails, a large iron pot, a large boiling copper, five flat irons, and two box irons. That's the equipment list for one of the wealthiest households in the colonies.

Here's a detail that stuck with me as a laundromat owner. The bulk of the laundry wasn't outer clothing. It was body linen. Undergarments. Shifts, chemises, drawers. Those were the items worn closest to the skin, and they absorbed sweat and oils that would ruin the finer garments on top. The expensive silks and wools were rarely washed. It was the linen underneath doing the heavy lifting. That's why so much colonial-era silk and wool survived for museums.

Think about that the next time a customer drops off a bag of work uniforms or gym clothes. The items closest to daily life are still what drive our wash & fold operations. That hasn't changed in 250 years.

And here's something else. Mid-Atlantic colonists might have bathed three or four times a year. New Englanders, maybe once. Imagine the smell inside a Boston meeting hall while men debated independence. Those handkerchiefs they were waving around? They weren't for dramatic effect.

The wealthier you were, the more clothes you owned, which meant you could go longer between wash days. The poorer you were, the more often you were hauling water, boiling lye, and scrubbing by hand. From the very beginning of this country, how you did your laundry said something about where you stood in life. If that doesn't sound familiar to every operator reading this, you're not paying attention.

The Women Who Kept an Army Alive

Here's where the story takes a turn that I can almost guarantee you've never heard.

When we learn about the Revolutionary War in school, we learn about battles. Lexington and Concord. Bunker Hill. Yorktown. (Hannah and I spent several days in Boston last summer to walk the Freedom Trail and immerse ourselves in American history. We highly recommend doing this!) We learn about the Continental Congress, the generals, the men who shaped the founding of this nation. But the unsung heroes, the supporting personnel, the families and spouses without whom those battles would have been a guaranteed loss, they barely get a footnote.

The Continental Army relied on women known as "camp followers" who traveled with the troops from encampment to encampment. They cooked, mended clothing, nursed the sick and wounded, and most critically, they washed the soldiers' clothes. Historians estimate thousands of these women served alongside the army throughout the war. They brought their children with them. They endured the same freezing winters, the same hunger, the same danger.

Why was their work so critical? Because disease killed more Continental soldiers than British muskets ever did. Typhus, which they called "camp fever," spread through lice and fleas that bred in dirty clothing. Dysentery ran through camps where sanitation was nonexistent. Clean clothes weren't a comfort. They were the first line of defense against diseases that could wipe out entire regiments.

The Continental Army was perpetually low on supplies, which made the labor of these women even more important. Washington himself recognized it, even when he was frustrated by the logistical burden of having civilians travel with his army. He wrote to the Continental Congress in 1777 that without enough women to wash for the soldiers, the men would either remain filthy or be forced to wash their own clothes, both of which would be deeply harmful to the army's health and readiness.

He understood. Without the laundress, the soldier can't fight.

Sarah Osborn Benjamin

I want to tell you about a woman whose name you've never heard, but whose story belongs in the history of our industry.

Sarah Osborn was born in 1756 in Goshen, Orange County, New York. In the winter of 1780, she married a soldier named Aaron Osborn. Shortly after the wedding, Aaron informed Sarah that he'd been called back to the war and wanted her to come with him. She initially said no. But Aaron was assigned to the commissary guard, and Sarah was told she could work alongside him. So she went.

For the next three years, Sarah followed the Continental Army from encampment to encampment. West Point. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Down the Chesapeake Bay to the Virginia Peninsula. She washed and mended clothes for soldiers, cooked meals, and cared for the sick. She spent winters in camp under conditions that would break most people.

At the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the final major battle of the war, Sarah was bringing food to soldiers in the trenches when she met General George Washington face to face. He asked her if she was afraid of the cannon balls. Her response, recorded in her own sworn testimony decades later: "No, the bullets would not cheat the gallows. It would not do for the men to fight and starve too."

Read that again.

A woman washing clothes and cooking meals for soldiers in a war zone, dodging cannon fire, told the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army that she wasn't going anywhere because somebody had to take care of these men.

In 1837, at 81 years old, Sarah personally appeared before the Court of Common Pleas to argue that her service as a camp follower, her years of washing, cooking, and mending for the Continental Army, deserved a pension.

She won.

Her pension file, W4558, is in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Her testimony is published in "The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence," edited by John C. Dann. The American Battlefield Trust has a full biographical page on their website.

Sarah Osborn Benjamin may be the first documented laundry professional in American history. And until this newsletter, I don't believe anyone in our industry has ever heard her name.

Valley Forge, December 23, 1777

On that date, George Washington wrote a letter to Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress. In it, he described an army in crisis. By a field return made that day, nearly 2,898 men were unfit for duty because they were, in Washington's words, "barefoot and otherwise naked." The army had seen no soap or vinegar since the Battle of Brandywine. Few men had more than one shirt. Many had only half of one. Some had none at all.

That letter is available today on Founders Online, a digital archive maintained by the National Archives. You can read it yourself.

That winter at Valley Forge, starvation and disease killed nearly 2,000 soldiers. The women who stayed in those camps, washing what few garments existed, boiling lice-ridden shirts over open fires in freezing temperatures, wringing them out with bare hands, they were not performing a chore. They were conducting a military operation. Without them, that army dissolves. Without that army, there is no United States of America.

When I read that letter, I thought about something that might sound strange. I thought about the ozone sanitation systems I have at each of my locations. I thought about how different things might have been for those soldiers if they'd had access to even basic sterilization. Not machines. Not technology. Just bleach. Just the ability to kill what was growing in their clothes.

And then I thought about what Hannah and I tell our team at every monthly staff meeting: never think what you're doing doesn't matter.

There is never a week that goes by at our stores where someone doesn't bring in bedding for a sick child that needs to be sterilized. We have several medical and surgical clinics that send us surgical towels, sheets, gowns, and scrubs covered in blood and human tissue. We clean and sterilize all of it and send it back so they can keep doing their jobs. The parallel between what those camp laundresses did in 1777 and what our team does today is not metaphorical. It is direct.

A Nation Built on Faith

I don't believe it's an accident that this industry exists, or that I'm in it, or that you're reading this.

The Declaration of Independence references God four times. "Nature's God." "Creator." "Supreme Judge of the world." "Divine Providence." Those words are in the document. Anyone can read them.

Washington referred to God constantly in his writings and public orders, most often by the name "Providence." His letters during the war are filled with acknowledgments of divine guidance. In his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, he declared it "the duty of all Nations" to acknowledge and be grateful to "Almighty God." He called God the "beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be." There are over one hundred prayers composed in Washington's own hand scattered throughout his personal papers.

This is not my interpretation. These are documented facts, preserved in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and Founders Online. The faith that burned in the founders of this nation is part of the historical record, whether it's fashionable to acknowledge it or not.

I believe the hand of God has been upon this nation since before its founding. I believe that same hand put me in this industry for a reason. The same faith that drove those founders, the conviction that you are called to something larger than yourself, is what drives Hannah and I to run our stores the way we do. To build a world-class facility in a small town where the average household income is $18,000 a year, not because the math made sense, but because we felt called to give that community a safe place. Air conditioning when many of them don't have it at home. A place that is positive, uplifting, and encouraging, no matter how bad life gets.

All disguised as a laundromat.

Sarah Osborn served her country disguised as a laundress. The first washateria in Fort Worth gave people dignity during the Great Depression, disguised as a place to rent a washing machine. And for 250 years, the people who've kept this nation clean have been hiding in plain sight, essential and overlooked, the same as the day the first shirt was scrubbed on a riverbank before a battle that would decide the fate of a country.

Happy birthday, America! And to every operator reading this: what you do matters. It has always mattered. The history proves it.

FROM THE FLOOR

A note on what I learned while researching this issue.

I spent more time researching this piece than anything I've written for Max Capacity. I read pension records from the 1830s. I read Washington's personal spending receipts at the Library of Congress, where his steward logged payments to women who washed his shirts during the war. I read a letter Washington wrote from Valley Forge two days before Christmas, describing soldiers who were barefoot in the snow.

And then I walked into my store the next morning and watched my team fold towels and sort laundry bags like it was just another Tuesday.

It hit me differently.

If you want to go deeper on any of the history in this issue, here are the sources I used. Every one of them is free and publicly accessible:

Sarah Osborn Benjamin's pension testimony: National Archives, Pension File W4558. Also published in "The Revolution Remembered" by John C. Dann (University of Chicago Press, 1980). The American Battlefield Trust has her full biography at battlefields.org.

Washington's December 23, 1777 letter from Valley Forge: Founders Online, National Archives (founders.archives.gov).

Washington's laundry receipts: Library of Congress, George Washington Papers, Series 5, Volume 29.

Washington Crossing Historic Park has an excellent deep dive on camp laundresses at washingtoncrossingpark.org.

Colonial Williamsburg's research on 18th-century laundry practices: research.colonialwilliamsburg.org.

I did this research because I believe our industry deserves to know where it came from. Next week, I'll tell you Part 2: how the laundromat was born during the Great Depression, less than two hours from where I sit right now, and how the industry that started with four electric machines in Fort Worth, Texas became the business you and I run today.

STEAL THIS

The Source List Challenge

This week, I'm challenging you to learn one thing about the history of your local market that you didn't know before. Not the laundry industry. Your town. Your neighborhood. Your specific corner of the world.

Talk to your longest-tenured customer (these are my personal favorite sources of history). Ask the old-timer who's been coming in every Saturday for a decade what this neighborhood used to look like. You might be surprised by what you find out.

The operators who understand their community's history are the ones who build stores their community can't imagine losing. Your store didn't appear out of thin air. It exists in a place with a story. Know the story.

THE GAP

Next week, I'll publish Part 2 of "We The People," covering the birth of the American laundromat and what it means for how we operate today. If this issue resonated with you, you'll want to be here for what comes next.

And if you've been reading Max Capacity and thinking about what it would look like to go deeper, Laundry Advisors is where that happens.

It's application-only. There is a waitlist. And there's a reason for that. When you're accepted, your direct competitors are not. The strategies, pricing models, and operational systems shared inside that room stay exclusive to your market. What you learn there, your competition doesn't get.

If that sounds like how you want to operate, the application is at LaundryAdvisors.com/Growth. Max Capacity subscribers go to the front of the line.