Students learned a lot about how hard people had to work to make their candles in colonial times here in New England. Our Schoolyard Habitat has bayberry plants in it. Mrs. Clark, this workshop's presenter from the Oakgrove Nature Center, explained that Colonial children would have been asked to gather the bayberries in the early fall, when the waxy coating on the berries was the thickest. Wax is a vegetable fat. A more easily accessible source of fat was from animals.
Some animals make better candle fat than others.
Sheep fat, called tallow, was one of the better ones because it got hard at room temperature. They burn with a smoky flame and they smell. Sometimes, when they got older, the candles smelled really bad like rotten stew cooking. President Abraham Lincoln is said to have read late into the night by the light of the fireplace when he was a boy. It is interesting to skim a History of Lighting chronological list .