The Old Coal Furnace
~ by Jeff Tryon
Smells, like songs, have the uncanny ability to transport us to another time and place.
Sometimes I will catch the odor of burning coal from some distant chimney, and it brings back memories of my earliest winters in Brown County and the old coal fired-stove that heated our home.
I grew up in a little house my parents built up near Fruitdale. And when I say“ little,” I mean tiny— a 30-by-25 foot, two-bedroom cottage. It sat on a walk-out basement that effectively doubled the amount of usable space.
My parents built the basement first and lived there with my two older brothers until I came along— then it was time to add more space. My Dad was an organized thinker. My oldest brother said, when Dad decided to build the house, the first thing he did was to build a drafting table, so he could draw up the plans. He was something of a Renaissance man.
Dad had elected to heat this little house with a coal fired furnace. Knowing Dad, he probably got a bargain on it because it was something nobody used or wanted anymore.
The coal furnace was a huge cast iron and sheet metal behemoth crouched in one corner of the basement, with big sheet metal pipes, like giant arms reaching out across the basement ceiling, connecting to heat registers in different rooms of the house upstairs.
Each register could be opened or closed. And there was also a device upstairs to open and close the damper on the furnace, which
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consisted of a long chain with a kind of turnbuckle crank mounted on the living room wall, and the other end on the damper door. When you twisted the knob, the damper door would either open or close, allowing more or less air into the firebox and thereby theoretically regulating the temperature in the house.
I say theoretically, because, in practice, once there was a huge coal fire in the belly of the beast, you could close every register in the house and damp it down until the cows came home, and it was still going to reach some mighty impressive temperatures in the tiny little living room where my nuclear family gathered and watched, the Cuban Missle Crisis, or Gunsmoke.
Dad worked really hard in an office job in Indianapolis, commuting to work each day before the Interstates were built or the I-465 loop. By the time he would finally drag his weary self home from the office wars each evening, the one major obstacle between him and his easy chair was the chore of building or stoking the fire in the stove. This involved trudging up and down the steep, narrow stairs into the dark, dirty basement, and doing battle with this fickle, cantankerous contraption.
Dad tended to want to get it over with, to go down there, lay in a goodly sized wood fire, throw in the whole evening’ s worth of coal, and be done. The problem with this approach was, by about 7:30 p. m., the internal temperature of the house would rise above what was technically humanly habitable, even though outside,
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