by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, January 14, 2022.
As the cold settles in and creeps under the floorboards, give a thought to the days Dr. William Perry described as, “a house heated only by fireplaces without furnace or stoves; bedrooms with fires only when there was sickness.” The heat he mentions, was produced with firewood. When Perry was born in Exeter in 1823, wood was the only way to keep warm. Firewood could be collected from the forest by gathering fallen limbs or cracking off the lower branches of trees, but this would not be sufficient to heat a colonial home.
How much did it take to heat a house? It is estimated that colonial households used 30 – 40 cords of wood each year. Each cord is eight feet long, four feet high and four feet wide. Firewood was such a necessity in New England that it was used as a bargaining tool when Exeter was hiring a new minister in 1698. “Whereas it was agreed with Rev. Mr. Clark that he should have 60 pounds salary, but now voted that he shall have 10 pounds more to find him in firewood and keep the fences in repair.”
Likewise, Samuel Lane, of Stratham, when gifting land for his grown son, set aside woodlots in Newmarket, providing his son agreed to the following: “that I will procure for him, halled [hauled] to his Dwelling House, cut, split up fit for his fire, yearly During Said Term, four cords of good fire wood; one half of it good hard wood; the other half Hemlock & pine; and more if he wants it.” Lane was elderly when the deal was made in 1798, and he was long past the age when hours could be spent splitting logs.
Large fireplaces, which were efficient at removing smoke from the house, were unfortunately very good at sucking the heat upwards. It was this problem that Benjamin Franklin tried to address with the invention of his stove – move the heat out of the fireplace a bit and pipe the smoke out. It didn’t work very well, but the idea was sound. Fireplaces improved in the late 1790s when Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) made them shallower with angled sides. The Rumford fireplace was the most popular style until the 1850s and it used far less firewood.
Sawing and splitting firewood required huge amounts of labor hours. It was helpful if the household had numerous sons or servants to take up the task. Otherwise, it would be outsourced to day laborers. The job demanded brawn and skill combined. Boys were tasked with splitting kindling at a young age. A young Henry Shute, growing up in Exeter in the early 1860s, had the daily task of splitting kindling before he headed to school in the morning. The task never got easier. Certainly, in a pinch, his mother could split her own kindling – most women were adept with an ax – but Henry’s chore was training his hand/eye coordination for the larger task of splitting large logs as he grew bigger and stronger.
Exeter’s populated downtown was deforested within a few decades of English arrival. Even as early as 1646, limits were set to slow down wanton overuse of the resource. “It is ordered that every one of the Inhabitants of the Towne shall seace felling aney more Timber for the present till further order be made for it.” It’s why we still have a position of “measurer of wood and bark.” The limits did not ultimately work, and the town was barren of trees until the 1840s when a beautification movement was begun, and trees were planted again. By the early 1800s, firewood had to be found outside of town. This is Elizabeth Dow Leonard’s flowery account of the annual wood harvest:
If there could be anything beautiful in the sight of fallen trees it might have been found in the preparation of our winter’s wood. Our capacious yard was filled to its utmost capacity with these dead monarchs of the forest and the air was full of the odors they emitted. The first light snows were considered the most propitious for their transportation and the men who went out chopping seemed inspired by the touch of nature it gave them. It was exhilarating to see the patient, dumb oxen hitched to the long sleds, the men clinging to the posts all arrayed with buskins and mittens and their worst clothes which so delights the genus. Their bright axes glittering in the sun and their merry voices filling the air with glee or vociferating after the cattle who mooed on sublimely indifferent to it all and only desirous to do their duty faithfully and well. A smoking, hot supper awaited their return and the sleds were unladen revealing the odorous silver, black or white birch – the tree of choice, as Bayard Taylor called it, the stately oak, the graceful elm and the whole tribe of sweet resinous evergreens indigenous in our forests. After these trophies were all collected witch took many days, commenced the cheerful sounds of chopping, swing and piling in artistic masses for another winter’s use, for it was considered quite disgraceful for the good householder not to have a wood pile large enough to ensure his family against the rigors of a possible Siberia and next to his barns and other stock houses did we judge of our neighbor’s thrift by the number of cords of wood he prepared for his family use.
The use of coal for heating in the mid-19th century, eliminated the annual ritual of stocking up on cord wood. Some only used coal occasionally. Isaac Smith Shute noted in his 1870 journal, “December 16 – winter commenced. Started coal fire.” He would switch to wood in April when it was only used for cooking. By the late 1880s, most people in town heated with coal. Elizabeth Dow Leonard, who of course took no part in the hauling or splitting of firewood, decried the modern use of coal. “Was it not more picturesque than the masses of black coal dropped at our back doors and from there ignominiously huddled into our cellars…the unsightly coal bin was not there.”
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org