Mary Elisabeth Brooks
Date & Place:
in Eads, Shelby Co County, Tennessee USA
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Mary Elisabeth Brooks
Updated Jun 26, 2025
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Brenda Watson
4 followers 385 favorites
01/01/2001
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AncientFaces
382k+ followers 411 favorites
10/04/2017
Molly was born in 1851 so she was a child during the Civil War. This 1872 photo vividly shows the fashion of her time.
Brenda Watson
4 followers 385 favorites
12/11/2011
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I would guess no longer than when I was young . We washed and rolled our hair wet with scraps of cloth or clean old socks
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And left them in while you slept? And did you use hairspray to hold the curl?
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I loved it when my grandma would do this to my hair when I was little girl.!
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Sue Keeley Hicks I didn't for a long time there was any other way. When I was around eight years old I'd help out by doing my younger sisters hair at night
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My Mom, born in 1927 said they would always do their hair in rags for special times like Christmas Eve.
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Also braiding damp hair makes volume and waves
Kathy Gordon
18 favorites
10/04/2017
I am thinking she rolled her damp hair in scraps of fabric and slept in them. My mom rolled my Shirley Temple curls like that for years until there were too many kids to put to bed. Curls held all day no spray needed. She also may have used a curling iron heated on the cook stove.
April Williams
1 follower 44 favorites
10/04/2017
Lastly, adding a little salt to the water solution when you are setting will give the curls staying power.
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They're called rag curls and they hold very well 😁
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Sue Keeley Hicks I used strips of old cotton sheet to curl one of my daughters hair. She will soon be 53
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My mom would roll cloth into my hair for those curls, and then I'd pull them so they wouldn't be too tight.
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My mom used to heat up a curling iron on the stove. Whenever my sister and I saw her coming at us with that curling iron, we would start to cry because we knew that she was going to burn us. And she did! Such torture. This was in the late 40's, early 50's.
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I'm sure they used a metal rod. Whoever did her hair would've had to heat it on a stove and hold the rod with a towel while curling the hair. To get her hair that precise, maybe one or two hours.
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Wow! That would leave a lot of split ends - and burnt hair!! :)
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Yes, the hairdresser would have to be very skilled.
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They did it in the Little Women movie... burned their hair off but that's what they used. :p
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I love that movie! Jo heated her sister's hair for too long on that one.
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“Be grateful for what you have now. As you begin to think about all the things in your life you are grateful for, you will be amazed at the never ending thoughts that come back to you of more things to be grateful for. You have to make a start, and then the law of attraction will receive those grateful thoughts and give you more just like them.”
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And here's an 1895 photo of her daughter - also stylish! Mattie Daisy Fletcher Hinson, 1895
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These look more like tamed natural curls.
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Really? Wish I'd have known how to tame my curls like that!! :)
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AncientFaces 😊. Think oil and sleep caps. People wore hats a lot back then and didnt wash their hair but a few times a year.
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Um, I'm pretty sure those are done with a curling iron. They had curling irons you heated in the fireplace or on a hot stove, basically a poker for hair. My hair wouldn't do that without product and heat.
And people then washed their hair once a week in general, on Saturday night before church.
And people then washed their hair once a week in general, on Saturday night before church.
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My mother used to do this to our hair as children. They were called "pin curls". She would put some "Dippity Do" (now called styling gel) on our wet hair and then wrap each bunch of hair with tissue paper, then twist each "tube" of hair into a spiral and pin it to our heads. We slept with it in and then she unrolled it the next morning.
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I remember doing that! And then came the big, big curlers - sometimes juice cans!! :)
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Grandma did this only she set her curls with beer.
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Mary Gerlach Griffith I forgot about beer - for volume!
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Yeah she’d pour some in a dish and drink the rest 😂
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AncientFaces I remember that too , jeepers I’m now older than dirt . Giggling
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I do this now! Heating tools don't work when you live in humidity. Haha. Rollers pull my hair too much. Pin curls work wonderfully
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I remember this, too! And we later used mini beer cans to help smooth and straighten our hair. Following that we ironed our hair with a scarf on top of it.
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I think they did have non electric curling wands in the late 1800s early 1900s; they put on a heat source. But before then, I also read they used strips of cloth and then twisted and rolled their hair up that way. You can see it sometimes in historical movie dramas.
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The kitchen stove, heat your iron or curling iron.
Saw a girl use one to iron her hair, very interesting cause her hair was na turally curling and she hated it.
Saw a girl use one to iron her hair, very interesting cause her hair was na turally curling and she hated it.
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Yep. If you've read Little Women there's a part where Jo is curling Meg's hair with an iron and she leaves it too long and scorches her hair. The book was set in the 1860s.
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As a young girl, my mother would have to sit while my grandmother wrapped her hair in rags; she did that a few times to my hair when I was young to show me what it was like. Time consuming and tedious but the curls were gorgeous and they lasted a long time.
Jean White
168 favorites
10/04/2017
Ladies,,,curling before Bedtime! Tear pieces of material into 6"by 2",,,wrap a piece of paper,,usually brown sack paper,, around each String! Pick up the end of a of strand hair, dampen it a bit with water,, roll to where you want curls to start!, Tie the string...go to bed..curls will be ready when you get UP, ladies went to a lot of effort to look good!, wonder what they would say,,,looking at all these awful heads of methsusa no styles today's world!
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They had curling irons, they just weren't electric......you heated them on the stove just like you did the iron for pressing clothes (which weren't wrinkle-free, either)....haha
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My daughter has her great-grandmother’s curling iron ... heated using a coal stove.
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I have one of the old irons for pressing clothes....I have no idea who it belonged to...it just showed up in the basement of the old house...
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They could be papillote curls, hair would be rolled in low pin~curls and tissue paper would be folded over them a special heated iron would be clamped on for a few seconds when cooled you would pull the tissue off and you would have tight long lasting coils.
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They had curling irons they heated on wood stoves, like pressing irons.
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Also curling irons that look very much like the electric ones we have now, they were heated by placing the blades down the neck of an oil lamp. They got the hair a little smoky but did the trick.
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Beryl Albertus remember what happened to Jo's bangs in Little Women?
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The inventor of the curling iron remains unknown, but the first known patent for the improvement of the design was given to Sir Hiram Maxim on August 21, 1866 (Mottelay). While the curling iron was first patented in the 19th Century, the practice of hairstyling has been dated back to 2,000 BC ....(Stevenson 138). I had no idea :P
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Curling irons. Here's a portable version for travel.
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Brenda Watson
The Black (Scots-Irish & English) and Howe (English) families originate from the southeast and northeast US. Surnames include: Black, Beardsley, Bent, Black, Brigham, Brooks, Bull, Carter, Clark, Conklin, Cooper, Curtis, Damon, Fletcher, Fullenwider/Vollenweider, Giddings, Goddard, Hart, Hicklin, Hinson, How, Howe, Kerfoot, Lee, Lockridge, Lockwood, Louthan, Mallory, McCoy, Meloan, Miller, Moore, Northrup / Northrop, Penfield, Peyton, Rice, Smith, Terrell, Trowbridge, Ward, Warner, Wetherbee, & Wright.
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