Village Squire, 1974-01, Page 14I was in a local hardware store the other
day and the proprietor was talking about the
difficulty in finding wood -burning stoves
these days and the price they cost if you can
find them.
"If only I had some of those stoves I sold
for scrap after taking in on trades a few years
ago," he moaned.
And it's true. Five years ago you couldn't
sell a wood -burning kitchen range or a
Quebec heater. Nobody wanted them. The
farm homes where they had been a traditional
source of heat for years, were all being
modernized and switched to oil and the old
wood stove was relegated to a corner of the
unused wood shed and never seen again until
The old days were tough
but we still have
FOND MEMORIES
OF THE
WOOD STOVE
BY KEITH ROULSTON
14, VILLAGE SQUIRE/JANUARY 1974
some scrap dealer arrived and offered to buy
it for a few bucks.
But the wheel has come full circle. The +l d
wood stove is a much sough -after item these
days. The primary reason, of course, is the oil
shortage and rising price of heating oil and
other petroleum products. That old Quebec
heater that you threw out a few years ago
because you couldn't sell it, may be worth S85
today.
Thinking back, those of us who grew up in a
home heated by an old wood stove have
wonderful memories. Things are always
much better in memory than they were the
first time around, of course and few of us
would really like to go back to living without
central heating just as, though we may love to
have candles or a fancy oil lamp around the
house, we wouldn't want to do without
electric lights.
When I was a gaffer growing up on the
farm, one of the chores we liked least was
piling wood into the wood shed every year
around This time.
My father and uncle were in charge of the
cutting of the wood back in the bush and that,
to us, was exciting. But the piling, well, it was
just a big boring job. Still, we knew we'd
better pile it in and in a hurry, or we'd have
wet firewood when the snow came and we
most needed a fire in the big, black monster
that sat in the kitchen and provided heat for
the whole house.
Mine, was the last generation to know the
pleasures and horrors of growing up in a
house heated by an old wood stove. Even
some of my fellows never knew what it was
like. Their houses were kept comfy by coal or
oil furnaces.
But we weren't that affluent and so the
ancient stove provided the heat, and what a
heat. When it was on, wow. The kitchen
sometimes closely resembled that hot place
the minister kept telling about on Sundays. It
took a good deal of careful consideration to
know just how much and what kind of wood to
put on the fire to get the right temperature.
There was no simple thermostat to turn up or
down. Give one of us kids the chore of putting
wood on the fire and you were.likely either to
be cold, or to be broiled in the next half hour.
Then there was the opposite extreme, in
the early morning. Before going to bed dad
would put a big block on the fire in the hope
that it would burn slowly during the night and
still be going in the morning. Thinking back,
however, it seems the strategy seldom
worked because I have vivid memories of
mornings on the farm.
First, you would awaken to hear dad
stumping down the stairs to get the fire going
. You lay there waiting for the fire to get
going well so there would be at least one
warm room in the house. You could hear the
scraping and clanging as the stove door was
opened and shut as dad went through the
motions of getting the fire going or getting a
little life into the last remnants of last night's
log Often there were other noises, noises