Geographic location: Lot 15, Conc 13, Minden
Current address: 9201 Hwy 118, Carnarvon, Ontario
Date range: 1961 - 1969
Interesting facts:
- This was the second location of the Carnarvon Laundry. It was built when the first location around the corner on Hwy 35 outgrew its premises.
- One former employee who worked at this laundry in 1965 and 1966 shared these details:
- It was just the basement then.
- It was a thing young girls did - you worked at a camp or laundry
- She and some coworkers stayed in one of the three little cabins behind Medley’s
- There were big washing machines that looked like an iron lung.
- She earned 50 cents an hour
- There were no driers and they hung all the clothes out “ you spent the summer putting out and bringing in laundry, over and over”
- They also used mangles to squeeze the water out of the clothes before I hang them
- “We washed a lot of underwear”
- It was mostly camp clothes, sheets and things from the Highlands Motel, and a few cottages also.
- One interesting customer was Fred Davis from CBC’s program front page challenge whose laundry was brought to them by a maid in a big black Cadillac
- Each kid at each camp was assigned a number and you had to stamp the kids number on each piece so that you could re-organize them once they were washed and dried.
- If it was raining the laundry would be taken to the Minden laundromat at night to dry and at that time the laundromat was where Minden collision is now
- They took in laundry from Kilcoo, Kandalore, Calumet, Kawabi, and Sherwood Forest
- Marcus would go around in a van and pick up the laundry from the camps
- “We’d sneak in the back of Medley’s because we were too young”
- We were 14 or 15 years old at that time
- The cabin at the back of Medley’s had two little bedrooms and running water but I’m not sure if it had an indoor bathroom or an outhouse
- There were two laundry shifts.
- “It was hard, hot work and it was pretty sweaty in there, there was no air-conditioning and the doors would always be wide-open for the breeze”
- “You put the dried clothes into pigeon hole boxes on the wall to be sorted back to the kids and then they would be put in duffel bags to go back to the camp”
- “You hung, folded, pigeonholed, duffelled … You did it all as part of your job”
- Kids laundry bags didn’t all look the same so it’s likely they were brought with them when they went up to camp
- We were told the lake was man-made for the mill.
Public access: Yes
Current use: Rhubarb Restaurant
Ownership History: