Remember the old woodpile

When the outside temperatures spend several days down below the 20 degree mark, I begin to think that winter has arrived. Of course we had that weekend back in mid-December when the cold reached almost to zero, but then soon warmed back up. During the cold days I've been noticing the homes around Pea Ridge which have smoke lifting from a chimney, indicating that they are using wood heat. I'm thinking that most people heating with wood are probably using wood-burning stoves or fireplace inserts. Even back when I was young most people were getting away from using fireplaces directly for heating or cooking. Fireplaces tend to burn lots of wood for the heat they produce. So much of fireplace heat tends to go right up the chimney and is lost. When fireplaces actually have a fire built in them, quite often it is as much for creating an emotional atmosphere as it is for actually heating the house.

My memories are going back to our old woodpile on the farm during the 1940s and early 1950s. Our old farmhouse was approaching 90 years old or so during those years, and as long as it stood we heated the house with a wood stove. So the old woodpile out behind the house was an important part of home for us. I'm not necessarily going to recommend the practices we used in maintaining our wood supply, because we could have done better than we did, but I am thinking of the two contrasting memories I have of our old woodpile.

One part of my woodpile memory is cold and icy. The other part is toasty and cozy. There are several aspects to my cold memory of the woodpile. The first is creating it to begin with. Some of our very efficient neighbors and acquaintances worked at their wood cutting and splitting through the year, so they were able to work ahead and had a good supply of wood on hand for cold weather. We, on the other hand, tended to stay busy in the hay and other farm work until it was late in the season and the cold was coming on. In fact, on many a cold and shivery day we were going to the woods with the horses and wagon and bringing in limbs and logs to be cut for firewood. Of course, when we were cutting firewood with snow on the ground we were resolving to work at it earlier next year. And, the next year, we would resolve again to do that.

Early on, we sawed firewood with a two-man cross-cut saw. That meant that two good men were needed to get the work done. When I was little, the second man on the saw was my Grandpa Scott Nichols. He and my Dad were really quite good with that old saw, both in felling trees in the woods and sawing up firewood there behind the house. As I grew to school-age and more, I began to learn on the cross-cut saw myself. I thought I was becoming pretty good at it, too, but of course Dad and Grandpa were doing most of the work.

In 1948, we bought our first Ford tractor for the farm, and Dad found a wood-saw unit for the tractor. The large circular blade was operated by a belt unit powered off the tractor's PTO shaft. It was very handy. When it was lowered to the ground by the hydraulic lift, the belt tightened around the pulleys, and all you had to do was rev up the motor, engage the power-take-off, and start sawing wood. With the tractor buzz saw we could make a pile of wood much faster than using the old two-man saw. Stacking the new-sawn firewood was usually left as a job to-get-to-later, since we always seemed to have other pressing jobs to see to. Usually our pile of wood just remained a woodpile, and never got stacked. Bringing in wood from the woodpile was another cold job, especially when the woodpile was crusted with snow and ice.

Nevertheless, a good woodpile was security for the wintertime, and sitting around the old wood stove with a good fire going in the evening times was real coziness and warmth. I especially remember how we brothers used to toast our feet before going to bed by holding them close to the stove with our heels resting on the shiny bars on the sides of the old black wood stove. We didn't have a lot of luxuries, but that was a real one. Standing by the warm stove to get dressed on a cold morning was also a luxury of sorts, especially when compared to dressing in a cold, unheated bedroom. Warming by the stove was also a fine luxury when we came in from the barn after the chores were done. We actually did miss some of our old-time wood stove luxuries when we changed to LP gas heat in our new farmhouse in 1953.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 01/18/2017