Heat for the House and the Cook Stove

Wood was the primary source of heat to keep the house warm and to cook the family’s food. The trees in
the farm woodlot were important – they provided the wood. It had to be cut down, chopped, split and then
hauled into the house.

Wood cook stoves were a lot of work. They needed the constant attention of the cook to keep the
temperature even. They made the kitchen unbearably hot in summer, the smoke from the burning wood
blackened the walls of the house and the ash box had to be emptied regularly. Some farm wives had
kerosene stoves. They had controls to regulate the heat and made for a cooler kitchen.

Stoves for heating also used wood. The second floor of the farm house generally had no heat except for
what came up through floor grates from the first floor.

“My mother cooked on the big wood stove. There was cutting wood and splitting wood. We did a lot of
that to keep the house and everything going for the winter. The house was heated by wood. In the
mornings, we would rush downstairs because my mother had the wood stove going plus her cook stove.
We were freezing upstairs so we had to run downstairs to stay warm.”

Ralph Zagrzebski
“We had a (wood) heater in the dining room and then the cook stove was in the kitchen. To heat the
upstairs you had registers in the floor. Heat rises and it goes upstairs to heat the rooms. Where my
brother and I slept, that was above the dining room. You had a lot of covers, quilts.”

Leonard Leffel
“I remember it would be so cold upstairs and we’d heat rocks in the oven and put them in a nice heavy
towel and put it in our beds so our feet were at least warm when we would go to bed.”

Edith Van Vuren Merriam

“Those days I still had a wood cook stove. It was hard to make maple sugar and even for canning syrup
because when it starts boiling it goes up so fast. You gotta know your heat. I knew how to bake bread
and stuff. You have to know just how hot your oven is to bake. It did have a thermometer on the front of
the oven door. But sometimes if you put too much wood in it the thermometer would be going up. A
neighbor had a (kerosene) gas stove and for some reason they didn’t want it. She called and said “I got a
gas stove here, $25 would you like to have it?" I jumped at the chance.”

Marion Heller Spindler

“We had the old irons that you put on the stove. They would go in the oven at night during the middle of
winter because the upstairs walls would be covered with frost so the beds were cold. We would heat
those up and wrap them in a newspaper or towel and put them in bed – for feet warmers.”

Brian Bushnell
“In the kitchen I can remember a wood stove with a tank on the side which heated the water. So I think
that was the biggest adjustment for my mother to work from, to go from a gas stove in Sheboygan to a
wood stove in the country.”

Lester Schneider, Jr.