Wood

I grew up in an old house with a fireplace, in a city where it is a news-worthy event when the temperature gets below freezing on a winter night. My father would sometimes light a fire, but it was entirely an aesthetic experience. I never paid attention, but I'll bet the gas heater ran more when the fireplace was in use than when it wasn't. Our woodpile consisted of just a few dozen segments of tree limbs, pruned from the trees around the house or scavenged from where city workers were trimming the live oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

When I moved to my current house in Deerfield, it had a fireplace — and about four acres of trees. The woods are mostly maple, gradually being replaced by oak, with fast-growing birches at the edges and a few big old pines. Naturally, I wanted to use the fireplace, so I had to learn to cut and split wood. For several years I used a handsaw to cut fallen trees, and an axe someone gave me to split the cut segments.

We rapidly discovered that in a modern insulated house, burning wood in the fireplace is a good way to cool the place off in winter. The fire sucks in air from the outside through cracks and under doors, and shoots most of the warm air straight up the chimney. For a time we could only have fires when the temperature was above sixty degrees, which definitely ruins the appeal of a blazing fire on a snowy night.

So a few years later we got a fireplace insert. I had been advocating for a free-standing wood stove (more efficient) but my wife pointed out that 1.) it would eat up a big slice of floor space we couldn't really spare in the living room, and 2.) we had small children. So I got an insert, which is basically a wood stove that fits into the fireplace and has a little fan to circulate air around it.

That worked far better than I would have believed. With just wood burning in the fireplace I can keep my house comfortable even if the temperature outside is down to freezing. Below freezing the gas-powered baseboard radiators have to take up some of the load. I suspect that if the fireplace was located in the center of the house, rather than on an exterior wall, we might be able to manage in even colder weather.

Having a fireplace that wasn't a cooling system meant that we burned a lot more wood. Which led my wife to buy me a chainsaw for my birthday, as sawing through tree trunks by hand was just too inefficient. Around the same time I also bought myself a proper splitting maul, and then a sledgehammer and iron wedge for the really tough pieces.

I've been cutting and splitting my own wood for a decade now, and I've learned quite a bit. One of those things is a tremendous appreciation for the men of the pioneer era who did all their wood-cutting with axes.

Felling a tree and cutting it into segments with a chainsaw is sweaty work, about the same way mowing a lawn with a power mower is hard work. But cutting a tree with an axe is about a hundred times more difficult, and that's not hyperbole. Each swing of the axe cuts a little chip, the width of the blade and maybe a quarter-inch thick. Chopping through even a modest-sized tree with a foot-wide trunk takes a couple of hundred swings.

Everything in the colonial era depended on cutting wood. If you wanted to grow food, you had to cut down all the trees on the land you wanted to farm. And those weren't the piddly little third-growth trees you'll see on my land today. Those were massive old-growth elms, oaks, and chestnut trees with trunks a yard wide. Clearing a field meant days of back-breaking work to cut them down, then more work to uproot the stumps. The air must have been full of the sound of axes year-round.

And it was a good thing you had all those cut trees, because you'd need the wood to build your house. More wood to make barrels and buckets. You'd save the especially straight limbs of oak and hickory to make new handles for your axe, because all that chopping would wear out handles in just a few weeks.

All those demands were dwarfed by the need for firewood. Every house had a fire burning all the time. Wood powered cooking, wood powered clothes-drying when there wasn't sunshine (i.e. nine months of the year). And burning wood kept the house warm enough to keep the inhabitants from freezing to death. Barely.

Every bit of that wood was cut and split by someone with an axe. The sheer amount of calories needed for that work was immense. There's a reason why early Americans in portraits and old photos look so lean and rawboned. They were burning calories at a rate matched nowadays only by professional athletes in training. Until the arrival of the railroad made it possible to buy wood or coal for home use, I doubt there were any overweight people in Deerfield, simply from the work needed to keep their fireplaces and stoves burning.

(This post also appears at the Friends of Deerfield Facebook page. Check it out for more on the town of Deerfield, its history and wildlife, and the upcoming 350th Anniversary celebration!)

Comments

[Chuk]

As someone who was a small child in a house with a free-standing wood stove, I've got to say that is a good call. (Same house was switched from an oil furnace to natural gas while I lived there and I wasn't in charge of the heating bills, but we certainly didn't have the stove burning all winter.)