Thread: Where did men get razors 100 years ago?

We look back and think people just started shaving in the year 1900, but that's not the case. The reason we think this is because nearly all of our historical pictures tell us this.
For the most part, men shaved. Nearly all of them shaved. Look on the back of the two dollar bill at the Declaration signers. No beards. In the 1700s, for instance, you had Bluebeard, Blackbeard, etc., with beards, but they were pirates. "Civilized" men did not wear beards and anyone with a beard was looked down upon as a ruffian or worse. A man with a beard was a man who lacked the cultural enlightment of a razor.
Beards were big up until the late 1500s and early 1600s. At that time, it was mostly priests who shaved to indicate celibacy. If they were swayed over to the protestant side in the Reformation and quit being celibant, well, they let their beards grow. Around 1600, clean-shaven was in. Big time. Peter the Great even levied a beard tax, so the Russian men would shave and the rest of Europe not think them savages.
In the 1700s, everybody shaved. I mean everybody. If you had a beard in those days, it meant you could not afford a razor, and couldn't borrow one. Even these wild, manly frontiersmen, like Simon Kenton, were clean-shaven. Lewis Wetzel, who had braided hair down to his ankles, shaved.
The beard didn't come into fashion until the around the Civil War, which just happens to be the same time cameras become widely used.
You can see the beard trend literally in the U.S. presidents. Washington was clean shaven and the next 14 presidents were, too. Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office whiskerless, but grew a beard while in office. Every president between Lincoln and William Howard Taft had a beard, or at least a stache, except Andrew Johnson and McKinley.
By the way, anybody notice how much Martin Van Buren looks like Bill Monroe? Put a white John B. Stetson on his head and a mandolin in his hand and he's a spittin' image.

Your actual question, where they got them? They bought them. They had stores back then. People living in extreme rural areas before the Sears and Roebuck did two things: they traveled to a trading post, or peddlers with a wagonful of clocks, razors, knives, rifles, sugar, all the stuff you need came to them.

By the way, here is George Washington's straight razor. I'll post it in its own thread, too.

Thanks everyone or the brief history lessons and stories from personal memory.

While I've not studied the history of shaving, from what I know of the tools, methods, and lifestyles of furniture makers and their cultrue in general 200+ years ago I suspect that they valued their "tools" for shaving as something to be preserved and tuned with their own skill and care. I suspect you'd get a razor and do what you could to make it last as long as you could. Even more for the rural men than the urban, given they had less choices for replacements.

Interesting to hear some of you mention the barber as a place to buy razors...duh. Makes perfect sense.

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

Gee guys 100 years ago wasn't the stone age. Even in the 1880s people on the Prairie made it into town every month or so to buy the necessary provisions they couldn't grow or make themselves. The local drygoods store carried all the essentials and little luxuries of the day including straight razors which were a necessity. There were also itinerant peddlers who traveled the countryside selling wares of all kinds to the people who couldn't get to town because of isolation or whatnot.

Points well taken. I was just thinking of the finer details, like where most razors were made (U.S., Germany, somehwere else?) and how they got around. That said, I know that commerce was much more developed globally than we tend to typically give credit....just slower.

Even the indians had straight razors if they wanted them. Razors were a common item on the manifests of trade canoes in the Great Lakes area as early as the 1650's.

By the 1700's military regulations called for the men to shave or be shaven regularly. The fasion changed toward more facial hair, (not typically full beards...so it still requiring some shaving) in the mid to late 1800's and then back to clean shave in WWI for the gas mask.

Dave

Dave,

That's right. I'd forgotten about that. That is what killed the beard trend, all the guys coming back from Europe with clean-shaven faces. I think also, the chemicals could stay in the beards.

Originally Posted by Fischjaeger

I think also, the chemicals could stay in the beards.

It was worse than that - you couldn't get a good seal on the gas mask with a beard, so the mustard gas or the gas-of-the-day would seep in. Guys that weren't clean-shaven 24x7 tended to not come home.

Originally Posted by mparker762

It was worse than that - you couldn't get a good seal on the gas mask with a beard, so the mustard gas or the gas-of-the-day would seep in. Guys that weren't clean-shaven 24x7 tended to not come home.

and you still can't which is why serving British armed Forces aren't allowed beards , unless they are of the Sikh Religion and then they can't serve in Combat Zones.

I don't think things were SO different back then, then now, merely more personal and small scale. The local store would have stocked everything, and every town would have had one. Everything was just a lot less then it is now. Two rows in the supermarket dedicated to tissue products was one or two items cheap and expensive if the town had wealthy people - cheap only if not.

I also suspect that one or two razors were well looked after by the owners and lasted a lifetime. I guess this leads on to the idea that most men, 100 years ago, knew how to hone, strop and care for their blade - whereas now we have only resources like this to look to for this guidance. But the obvious and related question - who did they learn to care for the blade from? Was it a father>son thing, the hardware store, where it was bought, just general widely discussed knowledge? Written instructions were probably all but useless to most people, given the illiteracy rates, so how did they learn it all?

Si

One of the difficulties for us in the 21st century when we try to understand the past is that we have so much stuff we can't imagine what it was like not to have multiples of anything we want or need.

Materials were very valuable and labor was very cheap; that reality caused things to be very different than they are today. I have a "trade gun" (flintlock shotgun) that has hand made parts of great complexity (to make them rigid) out of extremely thin material (to save brass).

I recall an account of George Washington having a fit when he saw one of his officers shaving his men (Washington thought this demeaned his officer)...this would indicate that some, but not all, had personal razors.

Dave

P.S. My avatar is a picture of a revolutionary war razor and its coffin/paddle strop on display at Guillifords Court House.

I am sure I read somewhere that the biggest cause of demise for the straight razor was WWI, but for a different reason. Something about Gillette, who had just invented the first safety razors, gave a free razor for each GI going to Europe with spare blades. 6 million guys going to a war zone with a quick, easy way to shave, and a good reason to shave, is a lot of new costumers...

Its a while ago I read it, and I could be quoting out of context, but I am sure I read this somewhere - can someone back this up?

Si