11/07/2025
My grandmother could turn a dead hog, a pile of ashes, and rainwater into something that kept her family clean for a year—and she never spent a dime.
She wasn't a chemist. She never went to college. But she understood saponification—the chemical process that transforms fat into soap—because her mother taught her, who learned from her mother, who learned from hers. In the Appalachian hills, this wasn't science class. This was survival.
Walk into any store today and you'll find fifty types of soap: lavender-scented, moisturizing, antibacterial, organic, artisanal. We agonize over which one to buy, then forget about it entirely once it's sitting by our sink.
But up until the 1900s—and in some Appalachian communities well beyond—soap wasn't something you bought. It was something you made. And the making of it was tied to rhythms far older than grocery stores: the changing seasons, the life and death of animals, the patient collection of rainwater and wood ash.
It started with hog killing season.
Late fall, when the weather turned cold enough to keep meat from spoiling, families would butcher their hogs. This was an all-day affair involving the entire community. Nothing—and I mean nothing—was wasted. Meat was cured, smoked, or canned. Organs became sausage and scrapple. Bones made broth. Hide became leather.
And the fat? The fat became soap.
They'd render the hogfat in massive cast iron kettles over outdoor fires, stirring and skimming until it transformed into clean, white lard. Some would be saved for cooking—the best biscuits you ever tasted came from lard—but a good portion was set aside specifically for soap making.
But lard alone won't clean you. You need lye.
And here's where it gets beautiful in its simplicity: they made lye from ashes.
All year long, families collected wood ashes from their fires and stoves. These ashes went into an "ash hopper"—basically a wooden V-shaped container with a small opening at the bottom. When it rained, they'd let rainwater filter slowly through those ashes. The water would leach out the potassium hydroxide from the wood ash, and what dripped out the bottom was lye—caustic, powerful, essential.
Your great-great-grandmother didn't need a chemistry degree to know this worked. She just knew that what came from the fire, mixed with what came from the rain, could transform fat into something useful.
The actual soap-making day was an event. The lye, lard, and water would all go into a huge outdoor kettle—sometimes the same one used to render the fat. For hours, someone would stand there stirring, slowly, steadily, while it boiled. You couldn't rush it. The mixture had to thicken just right, and you'd test it by letting a bit cool on a wooden spoon. When it reached the right consistency—thick enough to coat but not so thick it wouldn't pour—you'd ladle it into molds or wooden boxes lined with cloth.
Then you waited. Days, sometimes weeks, for it to cure and harden into soap.
That one batch—made from one hog, one season's worth of ashes, and rainwater from the sky—might last a family an entire year. It washed bodies, clothes, dishes, floors. It wasn't fancy. It didn't smell like coconut vanilla dream or mountain rain breeze. It was brown, harsh, effective.
And it represented something we've mostly lost: the knowledge of how to take care of yourself with what's around you.
The Appalachian people weren't making soap because it was trendy or organic or sustainable—though it was all those things. They made it because they had to. Because the nearest store might be a day's walk away. Because poverty and isolation meant you either learned to use everything the land and your labor provided, or you went without.
This wasn't romanticized homesteading. This was necessity transformed into skill, passed down through generations of women (and men) who understood that respecting what you had meant wasting nothing.
The hog that fed your family also clothed you, shoed you, and cleaned you. The fire that warmed your home gave you ashes that made lye. The rain that fell freely from the sky became the medium that turned it all into soap.
Everything connected. Everything mattered. Everything was used.
Today, some folks are rediscovering these old ways—making their own soap, rendering lard, building ash hoppers. They're called homesteaders, traditionalists, back-to-the-landers. But they're really just reaching back to touch something that our great-grandparents would have simply called "Tuesday."
There's a photo I saw recently of a woman stirring a huge black kettle over an outdoor fire, making soap the old way. And I realized: soap isn't just about getting clean. It's about remembering that humans have always been resourceful, resilient, and remarkably clever.
We took fire, rain, fat, and knowledge—and made something essential out of what others might have thrown away.
So next time you mindlessly pump some store-bought soap into your hands, maybe take a second to think about the people who made soap from scratch because they had no other choice. Who stood over fires stirring kettles for hours. Who understood chemistry through practice rather than textbooks.
Who knew that if you respect what you have and waste nothing, you'll always have what you need.
That's not just soap-making. That's wisdom.
