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Cold Sparks Warm Thoughts of Winters Past

By Adam Kelly - Editor Emeritus | Jan 19, 2022

As the thermometer dipped below zero during the current cold snap the clicking of our furnace, on and off, on and off, was soothing and reassuring. That background was conducive to recollection of some other cold winters, long ago.

In pre-World II days we used coal for cooking and heating at home Mallory, a little coal camp down in Logan County. Everyone did. Our tiny frame house was heated by a coal stove whose primary purpose was for cooking, and open coal grates. Unless the weather was dreadfully cold, usually we kept a fire going in only one grate. But even in the most frigid weather, there were no worries about frozen pipes because there were no pipes in our house to freeze.

We were frugal with our consumption of coal. Although monetary cost to us was zero, the fuel nonetheless had a high price. We dug our own, from a little coal bank high atop the steep mountain behind the house. That coal seam was 42 inches high. The opening into the little mine had been dug by the previous owner of the six acres we called home. The first time we went up to our coal bank after we had moved in, my Daddy very carefully used a pick to draw a straight line across the rock roof at the face of the coal. The last time I was in the mine, shortly before he died, it was amazing to realize how far back in that vein of coal that man so laboriously had dug through the years, every inch of it by hand, lump by lump.

There was a rough, rocky trail winding up to the coal bank. Daddy fashioned a crude sled on which to haul coal. He hewed wooden runners from locust poles and used hammered-out tin from cans to form a container within the sled’s wooden frame. This contraption he pulled up the hill–no easy task because of the steepness of the grade.

When loaded with coal for the return home the problem was to keep the sled on the crude trail without its running away. This was accomplished through loops of chains draped around the front of each runner. These served as rough brakes, dragging the earth to slow the decent of the sled. It was a laborious process.

So was getting the coal out of the ground. Daddy used a breast auger to drill small round holes in the face of the coal.

This device looked for all the world like a carpenter’s greatly elongated brace and bit.

The holes which he drilled were the diameter of powder sticks.

Daddy usually employed only a quarter-stick or so of powder. He inserted a blasting cap into the end of the powder, rammed the whole business into the hole in the face of the coal. The hole was then tamped full with “bug dust”–fine particles of coal. Two tiny wires extended from the blasting cap. These were let out carefully to their full length as we backed away from the face. Then the cap and powder were detonated with an electric battery.

After the smoke and dust settled, the loosened coal was dug out with a pick and then shoveled into a child’s toy wagon which was rusted and dented with age. The wagon was pulled out to the mouth of the mine, and its load of coal dumped into the sled. Then the process was repeated. And repeated.

Work inside the mine was illuminated by carbide lamps worn pinned to old–fashioned cloth miner’s caps. I suspect Daddy violated every safety precaution in the book in his mining efforts but he always was careful to keep the roof well-timbered, and the worst injury he ever suffered in the mine was a mashed thumb-nail.

As might be expected, there was plenty of coal for sale in the area where we lived. But as long as there was coal he could dig, from his own mine, on his own land, Daddy would have none of that. To my knowledge he never bought a lump of coal in his lifetime at Mallory. By the time his age and physical condition prohibited further trips to the coal bank, natural gas had come to Mallory and was used for heat at our house–to Daddy’s great, and often vigorously expressed, disgust.

But while I was still at home, on cold winter nights we would huddle close around the hearth before the glowing coals–all of us reading, transported to another world, another time, through the magic of words. In the course of the evening my sister loved to bake potatoes–dug from our own garden–in the ashes under the grate. These were given a cursory dusting and quickly devoured. When bedtime came, we would carefully cover the grate fire with ashes,” banking” it so that it still would be burning when morning came.

Bedrooms were absolutely frigid in winter. But Mother warmed flatirons before the fire. These she wrapped in an old blanket, and then slipped them in all their glorious, delicious warmth under the covers against our shivering feet. I was always asleep before the iron cooled.

The clicking of the furnace, on and off, is soothing and reassuring on this cold night. And I can taste one of Carolyn’s baked potatoes hot from the ashes right now.