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radiate heat directly into the room, driv- 
ing the cold back into the corners. The 
process juxtaposed radical extremes of 
heat and cold, a confrontation made 
vivid by John Greenleaf Whittier in his 
poem “Snowbound”: . . the red logs 
before us beat/The frost-line back with 
tropic heat.” 
Masons and housewrights gradually 
realized that smaller fireplaces would be 
more efficient. By the early nineteenth 
century, most New England fireplaces, 
with the possible exception of those in 
kitchens, were much smaller and shal- 
lower than those that had been built a 
hundred years earlier. The newly con- 
structed fireplaces had smaller throats 
and sharply angled sides designed to 
reduce the amount of heat lost up the 
chimney and to increase the amount 
radiated into the room. The published 
works of Massachusetts natives Benja- 
min Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, 
Count Rumford, explained new meth- 
ods of building fireplaces that were at 
once more efficient and less smoky. In 
many of the earliest houses, the smaller 
fireplaces were built right inside the old 
ones. Sometimes this process was re- 
peated more than once with an even 
smaller fireplace being constructed in- 
side the preceding ones in a continuing 
attempt to increase heating efficiency. 
Kitchen fireplaces remained larger as 
long as they were used for cooking be- 
cause space was needed to accommo- 
date not only a main fire with its large 
pots and kettles suspended from a crane 
or a lugpole and trammel (a device for 
hanging a pothook) but also several 
small piles of coals and the gridirons, 
trivets, toasters, and spiders being used 
to cook over them. A huge roaring fire 
was not advantageous for cooking since 
there was no way to control its heat, but 
maintaining a useful pile of glowing 
coals for cooking often resulted in a 
chilly room. Thus Harriet Beecher 
Stowe could describe how “Aunt Lois, 
standing with her back so near the blaze 
as to be uncomfortably warm, yet found 
her dish-towel freezing in her hand, 
while she wiped the teacup drawn from 
the almost boiling water.” 
To conserve heat provided by a kitch- 
en fire many New Englanders hung 
blankets from a wooden “blanket crane” 
or from a series of iron ceiling hooks in 
front of the fireplace. High-backed 
wooden settees drawn up to the hearth 
served the same purpose. By enclosing a 
small space, it was possible to maintain 
a more even level of warmth. The 
daughter of the Knight family of Han- 
cock, New Hampshire, recalled that her 
mother built a sort of tent near the 
fireplace on the coldest days, suspend- 
ing blankets around the children to pro- 
tect them from the bitter drafts of air 
that blew in around the windows and 
through the cracks in the walls of their 
house. 
Many early New England houses 
were constructed with central chimneys, 
which even when only one fire was actu- 
ally lighted always kept some warmth 
radiating through the building. Against 
such a chimney, grapes ripened, eggs 
hatched, motherless infant lambs and 
calves warmed, and geraniums kept 
from freezing. In a chimney cupboard, 
wines and fruitcakes were left to ripen. 
Herman Melville saw a purpose to the 
chimney’s warmth in developing “cor- 
dials, to a choice mysterious flavor, 
made so by the constant nurturing of the 
chimney’s gentle heat, distilled through 
that warm mass of masonry. Better for 
wines is it than a voyage to the Indies; 
my chimney itself a tropic.” This seems 
somewhat romanticized when we con- 
sider ink bottles frozen on the mantle- 
piece and washbasins frozen and 
cracked upon the hearth! But Melville 
saw the central chimney in his house as 
a source of family unity, and in “I and 
My Chimney,” he praised the fireplaces 
that 
all congregate in the middle — in one grand 
central chimney, upon all four sides of 
which are hearths — so that when, in the 
various chambers, my family and guests are 
warming themselves of a winter’s night, just 
before retiring. Then, though at the time 
they may not be thinking so, all their faces 
mutually point to one center; and when they 
go to sleep in their beds, they all sleep round 
one warm chimney, like so many Iroquois 
Indians. 
Houses, such as Melville’s, with a 
central chimney, had no hallways. The 
rooms opened on to one another, depriv- 
ing the occupants of privacy but encour- 
aging in them a sense of interdepend- 
ence — a feeling of community that Mel- 
ville saw as another virtue of central 
chimneys. 
Although most center-chimney 
houses were built with three or more 
fireplaces per floor, fires were not kept 
burning in many rooms at one time, 
especially when there were rooms that 
were not occupied. The danger from 
flying sparks and coals was enormous, 
and the amount of wood or other fuel 
required to maintain constant fires was 
100 
