Village Squire, 1978-12, Page 40r$ There's old fashioned enjoyment and thrift
in the new generation of wood stoves.
New generation of stoves brings
wood back as an
alternative energy supply
38 Village Squire. December 1978 ,
Remember the woodstove? If you grey:
up on a farm. who •could forget it?
For a hundred years. until the 1950's or
60's the woodstove was one of the most
important and prominent pieces of
furniture in nearly all farm homes in
Ontario. It was both a pleasure. and a pain.
There was nothing quite like the enjoyment
of gathering around the roaring stove after
coning in from doing the chores on a cold
day. The modern oil furnace just can't
conpete with that feeling of contentment
the stove brought on.
But there was also the hard hard work of
cutting down trees. sawing them into
stove -sized lengths. splitting the largest
kind. piling the wood in the woodshed or
basement and keeping the every -hungry
woodbox beside the stove filled.
Then there was the little problem of
starting the fire. If you v.ere lucky and
you'd built the fire up properly the night
before. there might be a glowing bank of
coals to get the fire going easily in the
morning. More often. or at least it seemed
that way. the fire would be dead out and
the house stone cold. The colder it was. the
longer it took to get the fire going. and of
course the colder the fingers got. Many a
vocabulary was enriched with spicy
language over a balky woodstove.
In many families, one person had the
unhappy job of getting the fire started
early each morning while the rest of the
household staved in bed, waiting for the