Colonial candle making was essential in an era where there was no electricity and the cost of oil made it beyond the reach of common people. The most common colonial candles were made of animal fat or tallow, and only the rich benefited from beeswax candles, which smelt and burned better.
Colonial candle making registered a true progress when people discovered that they could make nice-smelling and clean-burning candles from bayberry shrubs. Wax is still extracted by boiling the bayberries, however the process is as time consuming as it used to be in the past.
The colonial way to candle making
Colonial candle making largely depended on whale oil, which was used as a primary matter. The cleanest, but more painstaking way to have the best colonial candles possible was to harvest berries from bayberries bushes. The only problem with this process was that you only got one pound of wax for every eight pounds of berries. Then it took manufacturers several days to prepare the berries in order to extract the purest form of wax to be used for quality candles. Remember that their whole point was to eliminate the bad smell of animal fat candles, not to mention the...