OLD SMOKEY, THE WOOD STOVE

By Natalie Clountz Bauman

Has it been cold enough for you? Cozy up to the fire with a good book (or magazine) and some hot cocoa to warm up! Do you think your life is hard? Read how troublesome it used to be to heat the house and cook the food. I know all this firsthand because I grew up in a time-warp. In the outside world, it was the 1960s through 1980s; at my house, it was the 1930s, still in the hard times of the Great Depression days.

If it’s cold, we turn a knob and the heating begins. We have many ways to quickly, easily and even instantly cook our food. In the early days, people didn’t have central heating and furnaces for heating; nor gas or electric ranges and ovens for cooking. They had a wood stove.

Someone in the family would have to chop or saw down trees, chop them up in small pieces, and stack up enough to last the whole winter early enough, so that it would have time to dry. You didn’t want to burn green wood in your stove as it would create more creosote build-up in your pipes and could cause a fire. Nearly every day in winter, you had to carry in wood on to the porch and clean ashes out of the stove and carry them out. If you don’t keep the ashes cleaned out, it clogs up the air shaft at the bottom of the stove and it won’t draw the air through the stove and the stove pipe correctly, which will cause it not to burn hot enough and make the smoke go into the house instead of out of the pipe.

Sometimes people had two wood stoves, one for general heating of the house and one being a cook stove. You don’t exactly have a thermostat control on these stoves like modern ones, so it took a lot of skill and experience to bake in these ovens especially. My experience with the cook stove is limited since by the time I remember things, it had been consigned to graveyard of all things no longer used on the farm, the back yard. It was replaced by a gas cook stove. Here it resided, burying ever deeper into the layers of accumulated sand, leaf mold, and was finally covered by more rejected detritus, forgotten. However, the stove in the mid 1990’s was excavated and found a loving new home with me, fitting, since it is a “New Home” model. 

Now we get to the OTHER stove, Old Smokey. The cook stove is very attractive, Old Smokey, not so much. I’ll tell you ahead of time, Smokey is just for display at my house, it doesn’t smoke anymore, you will see why. The little, narrow stove was very functional however, it heated our house for many years. It was used in various rooms at different times with the flue pipe either cut through the roof or the wall to vent the smoke. It has a hinged door on the front and the top.

The hinged door on the top of the stove is for loading wood into it, but it wasn’t meant to vent smoke, but, brother, did it ever if you opened it! I can’t tell you how many times I was aggravated with Mama because she would pull open the entire top of the stove all the way and use the iron fire poker to stir the coals around and then LEAVE IT OPEN while she went all the way out to the porch to get the wood to put in it while the smoke BOILED up out of it in a column like a volcano erupting, making the air in the house completely unbreathable. She never would consider putting wood in the front door which smoked less, no, she opened to whole top of the stove.

Why did she do it? To save time, and so she wouldn’t have to put the wood down when she got it inside and open the stove, and then have to pick it up again. Seems a bad trade-off when your eyes and lungs are burning, and you are coughing uncontrollably, but maybe that’s just me. Breathing and eyesight must have been more of a priority for me than for her.

Maybe she did it to get me to come help. Wherever I was in the house, when I heard the top scrape open and the smoke started boiling out, I would run in there to stop the copious discharge of smoke by closing the lid. She would come in with wood about that time to find it closed and open it wide again and stir it….more smoke.

There was another place from which smoke escaped this stove when it was supposed to do so, a crack in the side. I don’t know how it got there, but we used it like that for years. People that went through the Great Depression like my parents did, will not spend money unless they have to and we didn’t have it anyway. As long as the crack wasn’t wide enough for big chunks of burning coal to fall out, the wisps of smoke that billowed up from it on windy days was no problem…for Mama. She didn’t mind the smoke. I didn’t like smelling like wood smoke everywhere I went. I’m surprised people weren’t always asking me if I was a firefighter…. or on fire.

But I do believe this is one instance where the new way of heating may be more convenient, but not better. Having experienced all types of heating, there is a difference in the heat of a wood stove, and my least favorite is the heat from an electric furnace. It seems like you can feel the heat better from a wood fire than anything else. The heat from electric heaters are a “dry heat,” which means it has to be 120 degrees before you get warm….just before you die from heatstroke.

Some of the old ways are still the best and can’t be beaten and this is certainly true of the Old Wood Stove. That is why I use a wood stove at my house now and let my electric heater gather dust in the winter. However, my stove is one of those new-fangled side-loading models, so I don’t smoke up the house like Mama. Even though Mama is gone now, I send up a few “smoke signals” out of the old wood stove to remember the “good old days.” I can hold my breath for a while.