I have finally gotten Merrill's Grandma's woodburning cookstove set up and
working in our backroom. Ralph and Bruce will know this place as they have
been here. The rest of you all are welcome any time, this time of year the
stove will be merrily blazing.
This stove had to be moved when the "home farm" was sold a few years ago
and we took it in. Had to get a decent chimney built, settled on a total
new "metalbestos" system. I love my "new" old stove.
This is certainly not my first experience with a woodburning cookstove, I
learned to cook on one then had one in the 70s.
We even have the original invoice from when Grandma bought the stove new in
1939. Is it an antique yet?
Merry Christmas to one and all, Ruth
At 9:30 PM -0500 12/10/06, [log in to unmask] wrote:
In a message dated 12/10/2006 6:43:05 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
there seems to be a water (or ash, or sand) bucket as well as a coal
scuttle with a galvanized coal shovel between him and the stove, too.
I was handling the stove and I could have just walked away with the
potlifter They're called lid lifters, since one uses them to lift the lids
on the top of the stove. You can still get them in hardware stores --old
ones-- sometimes - that's not really the term, but you know, the handle
which lifts the round thing on the stove surface, made so that the heat is
dissipated because the handle is just a round spool of heavy wire Exactly
so.. Inside it's just open, all the way to the bottom - there's a feed
slot near the top The door at the top is for shoveling the coal in, and the
circular three-triangled louver allows you to regulate the draft on top of
the fire. The fire itself burns in the potbelly portion, and there must've
been some sort of grate down at the bottom of the pot. My Baltimore heater
in Jersey City had had part of the grates removed, but there was an old
stove guy (Sid, son of Sam of Sam's Stove Repair, may the rest in
peace) who had the replacement grates for both my Balto heater and for my
Boynton kitchen range. The grates were like very heavy rakes, with 3 sets
of tines, and were turned with a removable crank to get the ash out, which
fell into a drawer behind a door at the bottom of the stove. The lower
door in Hopper's stove must've had an ash pan, and you can see the sliding
door that allows you to regulate the draft under the fire; more air below
makes the fire burn hotter, more above slows it down. , and an ash
draw at the bottom, plus vents and stuff, but no grate or anything in
between. Probably damaged by the heat somewhere along the line, and never
replaced.
So I couldn't figure out how such a thing works: you just dump the coal
inside and it goes to the bottom? There isn't an intermediate grate or
screen that keeps it off the stove floor, for air circulation? And how do
you start a coal fire, anyway? Kindling and paper, with a layer of coal on
top; after it burns pretty well, you keep adding coal. Too much coal too
soon and the fire is smothered. The stuff in the coal bucket right
beside it sure didn't look like Kingswood MatchLight to me. How big were
the chunks of coal? They may have been too big to use in a fairly small
stove like that, but not many people would know. The coal for my stoves
was no bigger than fairly coarse gravel I'd say chunks in the 1/2" to 1"
range.
Also saw Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's studio, decorated by the mysterious
Richard Astor Chanler. It's a work of immense human beauty, that a person
could create such a sublime thing, I felt like weeping, like when I saw the
mosaics of Thedosia in Ravenna for the first time. Did she have a coal
stove, too?s
Christopher Ralph
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--
Ruth Barton
[log in to unmask]
Dummerston, VT
--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
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