Coal Sheds, Reminiscences of Robert Hodge – Story 3 of 10
This is the third in a series of articles that Bob Hodge wrote in the 1980s about his childhood experiences growing up in Lawrence.
“While today, in these latter decades of the 1900s, we heat our home with a thermostatically controlled automatic oil furnace, this was not true “in the old days.” When I was less than five years old, we lived at the corner of 8th and Maple Street in North Lawrence, in a very small house next door to my paternal grandparents. Just outside the kitchen door was a “shed” in which large chunks of coal were stored to be broken up with a sledge hammer (or the flat edge of an axe blade). I don’t really remember the coal in the “coal shed” so much as two other items it held. One was an old gas cook range, the type which stood on four legs, with a two-door oven high on one end and four grated burners. The burners and oven had control handles of white porcelain. These adjustable handles were a source of much pleasurable play for me. I spent many a cold, cold hour playing with the handles, turning them in various positions, though I have long forgotten what the angles were to represent.
“The second item in that “coal shed” was a high mound of corn cobs. The cobs were used as kindling to get the fire started in the heating stove so it could be maintained by the coal. I have the idea they were popcorn cobs, but that may have been just my interpretation. I spent a lot of time picking off the one or two kernels of corn still clinging to the cobs and thought my mother popped them for me.
“When I was four or five years old, we moved to “Young’s House” (the name of the owner to whom rent was paid) in the 1300 block of Rhode Island Street in South Lawrence. It was heated by a coal stove which sat in the “dining” room (although we never ate a meal there, using the “breakfast nook” instead). The kitchen was heated by having the oven lit and keeping the oven door open. The front or living room was not used much in the winter for the dining room stove did not put much heat into the front room, leaving the room too cold to be comfortable. The coal at this house was kept in a coal shed which had once been an old chicken house and was adjacent to the alley.
“When I was seven, we moved to the “forty” acre house at 818 Locust Street in North Lawrence, again near the paternal grandparents. There were really just four acres, but numbers didn’t have much meaning at that time, and the place seemed too big to be just “four.” There, we also heated the kitchen, in the winter, with the lighted oven of the gas cook stove, leaving the oven door open. The rest of the house, however, was heated by two coal stoves, one in the dining room, where we did frequently have our meals and one in the living room. My parents’ bedroom was just off the living room and received some heat from that stove. My sister and I, in the winter, shared the upstairs bedroom over the dining room. In the floor/ceiling of those two rooms there was a register or grate which allowed the hot air from the dining room ceiling to filter into the bedroom above. That register was also good for “listening” to conversations below and for “peeking” at whoever might be visiting there.
“The coal shed here was also an old chicken house (isn’t it strange that chicken houses seem to evolve into coal sheds?) It had a mysterious cellar under it. Some years later, when the house was “modernized” this cellar became the site of a septic tank. At this house, it was one of my chores to break the coal, fill the coal bucket, and empty the ash pans of the heating stoves. These activities were done just after school-on-school days, and the coal bucket usually had to be refilled at least once more before bed time. When it was dark, my sister would hold the flashlight so I could see to fill the bucket. The coal shed was so dark the flashlight’s light rays were greatly absorbed, leaving very little available for illumination.
“We learned in school that coal was formed from compressed plants, and that plant fossils could be found in it, but as often and hard as I looked, I never found a plant impression in any of the tons of coal I broke up and carried into the house over the years.
“The last “coal shed” in my life, to date, was not a shed at all, but was a boarded-up area in the basement of the house we bought in Fredericksburg, Va. in 1956. We used the large coal furnace only two or three years, and then replaced it with the oil furnace. The coal bin was destroyed and when bedrooms were made in the basement, the old coal bin became one of them.
“I am glad to be rid of the coal and ashes and the dirt associated with them, but always regretted that my three boys missed out on “meaningful chores” and of not having had first-hand experience with the meaning of a COAL BLACK HOLE!”
