Let’s start the New Year with a correction and a revision. Thanks to Beth Chamberlain, who pointed me toward an 1835 household management book that mentions dying fabric with blue wrapping paper, I have revised Myth #49 about using (or not using) the paper to dye fabric.
While there is no evidence of this practice in early America (the 17th & 18th centuries), Beth noted that Lydia Maria Child’s American Frugal Housewife of 1835 mentions using “the purple paper which comes on loaf sugar, boiled in cider or vinegar with a small bit of alum, makes a fine purple slate color.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=Fq_uAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA39
I immediately went to other mid-19th-century household management books and found another reference, Eliza Leslie’s Lady’s House-Book; a Manual of Domestic Economy (1850) that contained a chapter on domestic dyes and told how to make “a slate color” with “the thick purple paper that comes round sugar-loaves.” No doubt there are other mid-19th-century references.
The question that immediately comes to mind: Why then and not earlier? What had changed? Research revealed a steep drop in the cost of sugar from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth due to the expansion of Caribbean sugar plantations. The market was flooded with sugar. Prices plunged, bringing sugarloaves, wrapped in their traditional purplish-blue paper, within reach of most housewives for the first time. Domestic economy books aimed at the middle class homemaker often pointed out economical ways to do things, and making homemade dyes would have been a useful skill, especially on the expanding frontier where access to stores was limited.
So this myth turns out to be false when heard at early American sites and true for later, nineteenth-century sites. I’ve modified Myth #49 accordingly. Another detail: those websites and museums that mention this myth usually say that the blue paper was used to dye fabric blue, when in actual references, the blue (or purplish-blue) paper resulted in a slate color. And many say that the blue paper was dyed with indigo, but Colonial Williamsburg’s expert on dyes, Max Hamrick, says it was most likely logwood.
As good luck would have it, Beth Chamberlain’s note arrived in the nick of time. A few more days and it would have been too late for me to modify this myth for Death by Petticoat, which has now gone to the printers. Readers like Beth are the strength of this blog–it’s given me the chance to preview things and make changes before going into the unforgiving medium of a printed book. I am grateful to all have chimed in with corrections and comments on various myths.
Wishing everyone a year full of good health and happiness!
Posted by Mary Miley 
