Back Home by Chris Hardie
The glow of the holidays is in the rear view mirror and it’s time to strap in for the long ride of winter.
So far we’ve been treated to a few sub-zero mornings, but the coldest part of the winter typically hits between mid-January and early February. These days I am grateful that I no longer have to endure numb fingers and toes having to face the elements while taking care of farm animals. Nor do I have to cut and split endless chunks of wood to feed the wood stove.
I still have a wood-burning stove, but it’s purely for decoration and fired up for some supplemental heat on frigid days or for additional ambiance. I enjoy that and the survivalist in me still wants a source of heat not dependent on fossil fuel or electricity – just in case of an extended power outage.
Fully-fired, the stove does hold heat overnight, which is a far cry from the early 1970s when my parents tried to heat their house with a Franklin stove.
The Franklin stove was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1742, according to ushistory.org. Also known as the Pennsylvania fireplace, it was a freestanding cast-iron stove that was an improvement from the stone fireplaces where much of the heat went up the chimney with the smoke.
While the stove was a vast improvement in heating, its flaw was having the flue at the bottom of the stove, which reduced efficiency. The stove worked best with a hot fire that kept the flue hot.
It was modified by others, particularly by David Rittenhouse whose L-shaped flue modification in the late 1780s improved the stove’s draft.
I believe that the stove my parent’s had – which was purchased from Sears – was based off of Franklin’s original design because it held only about four small chunks, burned hot for about three hours and cooled down almost immediately. The stove came with a removable screen when you wanted to view the fire and folding doors.
The stove would have been fine for ambiance but not for heating a tri-level home which had electric heat, but half of the registers weren’t hooked up the first winter we moved into the house. I remember Dad being gone on a business trip and Mom hanging up a bedspread over the room opening to help contain the heat. We were warmer while watching our tiny black and white in the TV room where the wood stove was but some of her houseplants in the living room actually froze.
The undersized stove was not the only challenge. We also needed wood. We had plenty to cut in the hundreds of acres on the farm but there was no large woodpile of split and seasoned wood. Dad, my brother Kevin and I – after the morning chores were complete – would head into the woods with the tractor attached to the manure spreader to cut wood all winter.
The 175 Massey Ferguson was not four-wheel drive, so it had limitations in deeper snow. We’d get as close to a dead or dying tree as we could. Dad would cut the tree down, remove the branches and cut it into lengths. I would pull out the branches and Kevin and I would take turns at splitting. We would toss the chunks into the manure spreader which had just been used for its intended purpose a couple of hours previously.
If the tree had not been dead that long and still retained some sap, we ended up with wood that not only smelled like manure but also like a cat litter box when it sizzled. I say sizzled because the wood really didn’t burn nice and hot, which led to creosote build-up and a couple of chimney fires.
The indoor heating improved when my parents also installed a larger wood burner in the basement. A few years later the Franklin stove was replaced by a bigger and better model of wood stove that held larger chunks and kept the fire overnight.
The quest for dry wood was always a challenge, but in the 1990s Dad installed a wood-fired outdoor boiler which heats water and is piped into the house. All of the fire risk and mess stays outside. It was the perfect stove for woodcutting procrastinators, as it burned any sort of wood, wet, dry, old, ugly … if it fits in the stove, it burns.
Dad replaced that stove with a larger model and it heated both of our houses and the milkhouse in the barn. I took over the woodcutting duties the last few years before Dad passed.
These days I adjust the heat merely by pushing a button on the thermostat and count myself lucky that I never had a major injury cutting wood. I enjoyed the physical labor and the feeling of self-sufficiency.
I still fire up the wood stove every once in a while, settle back with a cup of coffee and let the warmth of the heat and memories wash over me.
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
