Mops In 2025

A big mess. I think kitchens need cleaning more than any other room of a house. There are the makings of a feast for pests and things that are difficult to clean such as baked-on grease and oily gunk. Whatever needs cleaning often winds up at the last stop: the floor.

In “great houses” of the Victorian Era, the scullery maid was the youngest and lowest of the low house female servants. Her male counterpart was the “Hall Boy” who was also young and at the bottom of his servant list.

She was responsible for doing jobs nobody else wanted to do, including serving other servants and keeping everything clean.

Images of scullery maids show her on her knees with brushes and rags to keep the floor and steps clean. She might have invented the mop.

Originally, I believe mops started as a stick with a rag tied to the bottom. I don’t remember seeing rag mops, but there was an old corn-shuck mop my family used.

On the paternal side, they were fond of sage brooms and annually cleaning floors with river sand. It worked and for a while the floors were spotless.

Mops have gone high tech like everything else. You don’t see advertising for string mops because they now all have disposable pads, and I’m not sure you can scrub a kitchen floor clean using a plastic mop.

My preference is a heavy commercial string mop that is used with a large bucket on wheels. You can’t clean up a big liquid mess with a dinky little sponge mop or the remains of a jar of orange marmalade if it hits the floor.

There is a sponge mop here for cleaning floors that don’t badly need cleaning and, to tell the truth, we have a modern plastic mop with pads to clean the floors when they don’t need it at all.

The corn-shuck mop was a homemade tool with a short board with rows of two inch holes bored in it. The holes were stuffed with dry corn shucks and a hickory handle attached. It was not durable, but it was better than not having a mop at all.

Most families today are not blessed with supplies of dry corn shucks, but there is a corn shuck mop in the Douglas County Museum of History and Art.

About 1950, the Ames Brothers had a hit with a novelty song “Rag Mop.” It was catchy and upbeat, but now that I think of it, you can probably do more with the name “rag mop” than you could with “homemade corn shuck mop” as a song title.

joenphillips@yahoo.com