KEEPING WARM 
Come, Gather Round the Chimney 
Staying close to the hearth provided only 
relative comfort during New England winters 
by Jane C. Nylander 
In January of 1810, the Reverend 
William Bentley of Salem, Massachu- 
setts, commented in his diary: “The 
severest cold I ever knew. . . . Several 
Old Persons perished within doors. In 
my own Chamber on Saturday, with a 
brisk fire, I found the Therm, on the 
southern side of the Chamber at the 
greatest distance from the fire at 3 p.m. 
16 Far[enheit], below freezing.” 
Modern Americans who complain 
about presidentially mandated daytime 
temperatures of 68° might learn some- 
thing about stamina and endurance 
from a close examination of the life 
styles of Bentley’s early New England 
contemporaries. Those who have mas- 
tered the technology of solar panels or 
the servicing of an airtight stove, how- 
ever, can take comfort in the advantages 
of modern methods of keeping warm 
that use the same fuels that were avail- 
able to the good Doctor. These people 
are involved in an ongoing process of 
experimentation with improved heating 
NY Public Library /Coxe-Goldberg Photography 
Chairs were pulled as close to the open fire as possible. 
methods and more efficient use of mate- 
rials that was beginning even in early- 
nineteenth-century New England. 
Coping with winter’s chill in the days 
before there was any kind of central 
heating required considerable labor and 
forethought. No one could hope for even 
a degree of comfort without careful 
preparation and significant expenditure 
of money, personal energy, or both. Yet 
even for those who could afford all the 
fuel they wanted, it was almost impos- 
sible to keep a house warm by relying 
exclusively on open fireplaces. Anne 
Jean Lyman wrote of her girlhood home 
in Milton, Massachusetts: 
The winters were long and cold; the appli- 
ances for heat not what they are now, the 
large open chimneys and wood fires being 
cheerful to the eye, but with their ample 
draughts not warming to the body. We wore 
our great coats in the house half the time, 
Sally and I, and even then could not have 
been warm without the active employments 
that kept us constantly busy. 
One family recorded “the coldest day 
we have had” on which the thermom- 
eter outside stood at twenty below zero. 
Upon arising, the family found that the 
thermometer in the bed chamber stood 
at three degrees, and with a good fire 
throughout the morning they were only 
able to raise it to eight degrees by noon. 
Apparently, other rooms in the house 
were somewhat warmer, and some 
members of the family descended to the 
parlor to dress beside the fire there. One 
suspects that the chamber thermometer 
was not hung near the fireplace, but the 
actual spot is not recorded. 
The winters of New England are of- 
ten reputed to have once been colder, 
longer, and snowier than those of mod- 
ern times. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote 
in her novel Old Town Folks: 
One of my most vivid childish remem- 
brances is the length of our winters, the 
depth of our snows, the raging fury of the 
storms that used to rage over the farm- 
house, shrieking and piping round each 
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