Category: Pioneers

Gus Waschke, my grandpa, included a state-of-the-art wood furnace in the house he built in 1916. I have not found any records of the original installation, but the firebox door casting bears the inscription “Mt. Baker”, which suggests that the furnace was a Whatcom County product. The furnace consists of a cast iron firebox surrounded by a sheet metal housing that conducted heat emanating from the firebox upward to a heat register immediately above the firebox and a heat duct that directed heat to the old master bedroom and bathroom.

In the old days, a fire in the furnace marked a special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and anniversaries warranted starting up the furnace, but an ordinary day was heated by the wood kitchen range. The only warm room in the house was the kitchen; the bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, living room, and library were all unheated. When the northeaster howled and threatened frozen pipes, Grandpa might fire up the furnace for a few hours, but for its first forty or so years, the furnace was only for special occasions.

When my parents, Ted and Thelma, took over the house in the mid-50s, the furnace began to be used daily in the cold months. My mother was not content to live in the kitchen from October to May. The television, which materialized in 1955, was in the living room, located so it could be watched from the dining room table. Instead of a cozy family gathering snugged into the kitchen breakfast nook, the evening meal became an event dominated my Walter Cronkite and the evening news. That lifestyle required a fire in the wood furnace.

Writing about these events causes me to think about my family in ways that I have never considered. My mother and father often bickered, but never argued. My father was more sentimental than my mother and she often called him on improbable sentimental stories. My mother was quick to judgement and Dad did not hesitate to point out her errors. But I did not notice how they decided to change the pattern of heating the house. Both Mom and Dad must have agreed that more of the house had to be warm.

Changing the heating pattern was significant. My dad had to cut more wood for the furnace. Stove wood for the kitchen range was cut sixteen inches long. Dad and Grandpa cut furnace wood to three feet. The furnace was large enough to burn traditional four-foot cord wood, but Dad said three-foot lengths were easier to handle and burned more completely.

Dad and Grandpa cut stove wood with the buzz saw powered by a flat belt from the tractor. Through the spring and summer, they would gradually build a pile of ten to fifteen foot poles cut from branches and small trees. The poles were usually crooked and not more than five inches thick. The buzz saw had a three-foot circular blade and a sliding table. One man would place the poles on the sliding table, usually several at a time, and push the sliding table into the spinning blade, cutting the poles into sixteen-inch stove wood. A second man would catch the stove wood and toss the sticks onto a flatbed hay wagon for transport to the woodshed. Two men and a buzz saw could cut several ricks (a stack of wood eight feet long and four feet high and one stick wide) in an hour. A full day on the buzz saw produced enough stove wood for the winter.

The buzz saw was the easiest and fastest way to cut stove wood, but not all wood could be cut with the buzz saw. When a bigger tree fell, or Dad and Grandpa decided it was time to drop a mature tree, the main trunk would be too thick and heavy to cut with the buzz saw. Limbs could be cut and trimmed for the buzz saw, but the main trunk had to be cut into usable lengths and split. Dad preferred to use the trunks for three-foot furnace wood, but when he had a surplus of furnace wood, he’d cut the trunks into stove wood lengths.

Wood from the trunks had to be split with an axe or maul and wedge. Cutting the wood was relatively quick and easy. Splitting wood was harder and took more skill. By the time I was in junior high (middle school), I was splitting wood regularly. Smaller pieces with straight grain and few knots can be split with an axe, which is quicker and easier than using a maul and wedge. With some practice—not more than two or three years—you can learn to judge which fletches can be split with an axe. The trick is to make a few quick and light chops to start the split and then a hard final stroke that finishes the job. If a fourteen-year-old delivers a hard stroke that is not hard enough to split the block, the axe gets stuck. Unsticking an axe takes a lot of energy and the splitter soon gets tired, which is bad because judgement sags and the axe sticks more often in a descending spiral.

A maul and wedge takes less skill and more energy. My Dad’s technique was to use both axe and maul. First a few strokes with the axe to direct the split, then drive a wedge with the maul until the wood splits. If you plan the first strokes right, taking into account the twists in the grain and knots, his technique works well. I haven’t used a hydraulic splitter much, but from my experience, my dad or grandpa could split more wood per hour than the machine. Fifty years ago, I could too, but not today after spending most of my life sitting in an office.

My grandpa didn’t like chain saws. My dad loved chain saws and used them as much as could for falling trees, limbing, and cutting up trunks. When my grandpa retired and moved into the place across the road from the farm, he owned a chain saw, but he bought a Swedish bow saw and a one-man five-foot crosscut saw, both of which are mounted on the wall in my office. He built a saw buck. His new house had electric heat, but he planned to heat it with hand cut stove wood.

My grandpa’s plan failed. My tobacco chewing grandpa was wracked with colon cancer and never filled his woodshed with enough wood to heat his new house. He tried, but in the three years between moving to his new house and dying, he never heated his house with hand cut wood.