Stoking The Stove

 

Roughing it a little in the summers was a big part of a attaction to the South Fork Area for me. Here’s a little of the story.

 

 

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Stoking The Stove

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When we would go to South Fork in the summer months to visit my folks at their cabin, it was like our life styles would go back in history about 100 years. For the primary source of heat in the cabin, my Dad had a Boxwood Cast Iron Stove sitting right out in the middle of the floor on an insulated steel plate with a dampener to control the heat. You wouldn’t think you would need any heat in the summer months, but the temperature often dropped into the 30’s at night in June, so when you got out of bed in the morning, it was quite chilly in the cabin.

 

Stove just  like the Boxwood Cast Iron Stove my Dad had sitting in the middle of the floor of his cabin for heat. That stove worked like a charm.

 

 

The first person to roll out of bed in the morning had the job of stoking the stove to get the cabin toasty warm for the rest of the crew. We kept a stack of old newspapers and a stack of split aspen logs inside to get things started. All you had to do was to open the front door to the stove and throw in a couple of crumpled newspapers and lay four logs on top of them with the dampener wide open. We then lit off the newspaper, closed the front door, and let the stove do its thing.

 

Looks like Carl was the first person up this morning as he is stoking the stove to take the chill out of the air so the rest of the people in the cabin can crawl out of bed.

 

 

After I lit the stove off, I would sit down in the close by rocking chair and feel the warmth building up in the cabin. In fifteen minutes, the sides of the stove would be glowing red. I often sat there and thought about our forefathers that used a manual dampener as a thermostat to control the stove. One charge of wood in the morning was all we needed to take the chill off in the mornings during the summer months.

 

 

 

I dearly loved those summer trips to South Fork where we chopped our own wood, hauled our drinking water, heated with a cast iron stove, went to KOA camp grounds to shower, and crapped in an outhouse out back with a moon cut in the door. But, returning home to all the modern conveniences was always nice.

 

It was always good to get back to running water, indoor crapper, and the shower just to name a few things.

 

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Thanks for reading Stoking The Stove,
Bill