Now & Then : Old house had heat and air — stove and breeze-way
Posted on Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Before we built a new house on the farm in 1953, we lived in a house that was probably nearing 100 years old. It was not an unsound house, and wasn't in danger of falling down or anything like that. But it was a house from another era. Our family was looking for a newer style house, one that had a better layout of rooms, a more compact and convenient kitchen, and so on.
But our old house had some interesting and useful features. It was a white frame house with the main interior part measuring maybe 50- by 30-feet. Along the front of the interior part was the living room and a large bedroom, separated by closet space, and with a short hallway connecting the rooms. The kitchen was a long kitchen entered by way of a door from the living room. A dining table stood at one end and left the kitchen by the north door, you entered a small bedroom, which was usually assigned to me and my brother, Ben. All along the back of the house was a screened-in back porch. Likewise, along the front was an open front porch running almost the full length of the house.
In those days, the front porch and back porch were important parts of the house; much more so than is the case for today's houses and families. We usually had a front porch swing just outside the living room door. The front porch was a place to visit with "company," especially in summertime when the weather was hot. Most of the time it was fairly uncluttered, so when we kids were little we could run our tricycle around a "track"on the front porch, or we could lay out a town and make pretend cars from blocks of wood, and drive up and down our "streets. "When we were little kids, Ben's cars were always Fords. The sound he made for a car sounded like a V 8 Ford. On the other hand, I knew how to make the 6-cylinder Chevrolet sound, so my cars were always Chevrolets.
The screened-in back porch was more of a place for work; a place for practical everyday necessities. In the center of the porch, across from the door into the kitchen, was a door in the floor which lifted to reveal steps leading down to the cellar. The old cellar was just a dugout area under the back porch. The cellar was outfitted with numerous shelves where canned goods were stored. I remember glass jars in pints and quarts and halfgallons, filled with all kinds of good stuff to eat. I especially remember jars of canned beans and peaches, but there were many other things as well, beets, corn, vegetable soups, and so on. We didn't buy a great many things from the grocery store in those days; we "put up"much of what we ate from our large garden. Near the north end of the back porch was the wringer washing machine, and a table holding two large tubs for rinse water. At the very north end was another table where cured meats were stored. I especially remember the salt-cured hunks of pork, and the pretty good eating it all provided. At the south end of the back porch was a place for a bed or two, in case we wanted to sleep on the porch, but it was most often used for storage, a work table, and so on.
Today, when people build new houses, one of the main parts of the plan is heat and air. In the 1940 s we thought about how to heat the house, but cooling it meant opening the windows to let the cool breezes blow through, if there were any. If someone had mentioned "air conditioning"to me then, I would have asked," What's that ?"Sometime in the late 1940 s or early 1950 s I remember beginning to hear about air conditioned motels and movie theaters. That was really "getting up town. "It didn't occur to us that someday houses could be air conditioned, too. But we had a great wood stove in the living room to heat our old house. At the end of the day I would sit near the stove and rest my heels on its shiny rail and just "bake "my feet. Sometimes, if it was really cold, Mom would heat a brick on the stove, then wrap it in a towel and put it under our covers so it would warm our feet in the bed. Wood heating stoves required lots of work, cutting wood, splitting wood, carrying in wood. Sometimes in winter the woodpile would be covered with snow and crusted together with ice. But when you had a good wood fire going in the stove, the heating was great. The propane floor furnace in our new house was never as comfortable as that old wood stove with its crackling fire and its radiating heat just soaking all through you.
I used to wonder how Santa Claus could get down our chimney and through that stove pipe. But somehow he made it with presents for us every Christmas.
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