While sorting through several boxes of genealogy items this weekend, I came across this artifact in my collection that was given to me by my great aunt Dorris (Sickels) Smith (1926-2019) who was married to my great grand uncle DeBurl Smith (1922-2013) (brother of my maternal grandmother, Audra). DeBurl Smith’s mother was Ola (Kelso) Smith.

I not only have a recipe for the salve (perhaps dated from the mid to late 1800s), but also a small sample of it that was taped to the bottom of the copied two-side printed paper. As this bit of 100+ year old salve is now hard as stone, I would be curious to know, if heated, what would it’s texture be like and how pliable would it have been when used? With all the ingredients, including the strong-smelling turpentine, what would the aroma have been? That being said, I’m not intrigued enough to destroy it in the process. These questions will have to go unanswered, mystery unsolved.

While the recipe itself is preserved, I do not know which generation of Kelso’s initially made a record of it, whether it was my 2X great grandmother, Chloe (Headley) Kelso (1857-1956) or her daughter, my great grandmother, Ola Jane (Kelso) Smith (1890-1990). It might date back even further to the prior generation of Samuel B. Kelso (1819-1878) and his wife, Margaret Jane (Fauver/Farver) Kelso (1824-1906).

The document I have is a double-sided photocopy and looks like the ingredients and instructions were recorded at two different times. The recipe directly below is an older typewriter font, while the second photo looks like it’s Time New Roman which is a newer computer font. The first photo includes handwritten instructions for processing the salve. The second photo details how to use the salve to heal.

The recipe might have been passed down orally until it was finally recorded in written format.

The person(s) who wrote out this recipe made a hypothesis that ‘this may have been an early recipe for healing, used by Indians’. Two ingredients that stand out to me that Native Americans would not have had access to would have been olive oil and turpentine.

According to a Google search:

“Native Americans did not used refined turpentine, but they widely used raw pine resin and pitch. They gathered sticky sap straight from pine trees and used it as a natural medicine, glue, and waterproofing agent. True distilled turpentine requires industrial metal stills, which were brought to North America by European settlers.”

While this exact formula and method may not have been used by Native American, it’s entirely plausible that the original recipe evolved over the years to the one used by the Kelso’s and is a wonderful example of homeopathic medicines used in everyday households.