RUMFORDESQUE FIREPLACE
This is a photo of the kitchen fireplace, woodbox, and bake oven in the Standish House, of which the original section (see previous posts) was built in 1690. The fireplace itself cannot be older than 1720. This is why and also why it was likely ahead of its time.
When the house was originally built in 1690, it was a two-room cabin; located in what was then a nearly complete wilderness, it may have had a fireplace, but it certainly wasn't this one. Fireplaces at that time were likely crude things built of stone mortared with whatever was at hand. Brick was available only where there was clay and lime mortar where there was limestone, neither which exist in quantity around Preston, Connecticut. This is granite, basalt, gneiss and schist country. It is possible that mortar was available from the seacoast twelve miles away, where huge oyster beds sporting oysters the size of Volkswagens lined the bays and inlets. Their shells were often burned and slaked for lime.
But the house was abandoned and reinvested, then raised and a cellar dug under it, when a proper fireplace was built. Which is the problem.
Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford, designed the Rumford Fireplace in the late 18th century. Before his design, most fireplaces were deep rectangular things that used enormous amounts of wood, hardly heated a room, and often spit smoke back into the house. His design incorporated a taller, shallower firebox with angled sides and a nearly nonexistent rear wall. This allowed for smaller fires that radiated a lot more heat into the room.
The firebox at the Standish House has a wider rear wall than an official Rumford fireplace, so it is not authentic (and so dubbed ('Rumfordesque’). And though I have no idea just how old it actually is (the stone hearth and structure in the cellar is said to be 1720 or thereabouts), if it is older than the 1790s, it predates Rumford’s design and utilizes nearly the same angles and height. I believe it is authentic to the 1720s, as the rest of the house was built around it and the lines haven't really changed.
All I know is that a small fire really heats the room to a toasty degree. The dogs like it, anyway.
And that’s what really matters, isn’t it?
The dogs do seem to be soaking it up.
ReplyDeleteSplain to me this. You say it's a fireplace, woodbox and bake oven. I take it the small hole w/ kindling is the bake oven. In its time, did it have an iron door? Was it heated by the fireplace or did it have its own little firebox? A flue, too?
You are correct, as I said, it is a fireplace, woodbox (below) and bake oven (above). I store kindling in the bake oven because I don't use it and because if I leave it on the floor or in a bucket, my gigantic puppy with chew the sticks into splinters all over the rug in front of the fireplace. The bake oven is known a beehive oven because of its interior shape, and yes, it once had an iron door, since removed. The frame of the door is still there. There is a metal vent as well, located at the front of the oven behind the door frame. It worked by taking coals from the fireplace, putting them in the beehive oven floor, and either cooking directly on the coals or removing the coals and using the heat of the brick that lines the floor. The sides of the brick that fronts woodbox have been worn curved because of the wood that was stuck in and pulled out through the centuries.
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