KEEPING 
ing hospitality when a guest arrived late 
one cold winter evening. “It was very 
inconvenient,” she wrote, “the fire in the 
kitchen had been out for hours and 
everything was frozen.” She was obliged 
to start another fire, and to thaw cheese, 
water, and bread before she was able to 
serve her guest a simple meal of tea, 
toast, and cheese. Even daily kitchen 
chores were rendered difficult by severe 
cold. One housekeeper noted in her 
diary, “Hard frost is very inconvenient 
in one’s larder. You cannot lay by a little 
broth or gravy without its becoming as 
hard as stone, sometimes breaking the 
vessel that contains it, and not available 
on short notice.” 
The cold drafts of which the early 
diarists and letter writers complained 
were difficult to prevent, for cracks 
opened up in even the most well built 
houses as wood and putty shrank or 
glass cracked. In areas of new settle- 
ment, houses were quickly constructed 
of green wood, and it was particularly 
difficult to keep out drafts during the 
first few heating seasons. A variety of 
measures were used to seal up cracks or 
prevent drafts. Banking the house foun- 
dation with leaves, straw, and other veg- 
etative debris appears to have been a 
common practice in rural areas. Noah 
Blake of Deerfield, Massachusetts, used 
cornstalks and pumpkin vines for this 
purpose in December of 1802; many 
other New England diarists describe the 
practice without specifying the material 
used. 
By the 1830s there was a growing 
number of domestic advice books, di- 
rected primarily at women and offering 
suggestions for every aspect of house- 
keeping. One author, Miss Leslie, pub- 
lished a very practical volume, The 
House Book, with a number of sugges- 
tions for coping with cold drafts indoors. 
Thick strips of wood covered with baize 
(a green woolen cloth) might be nailed 
to the outside of doors to serve as a sort 
of weatherstripping. Leslie also de- 
scribed seeing in “old fashioned houses” 
of the wealthy, “gilt or morocco leather, 
pinked or scalloped at the edge, tacked 
with gilt or brass nails round the crack 
of a door, and as it was considered 
ornamental as well as useful, it was left 
there all summer.” She also described 
much simpler and more economical 
methods of forestalling drafts, such as 
“keeping the key always in the lock” 
and making long narrow bags of carpet 
or other thick cloth and filling them 
with hard sand before placing them 
WARM 
against the threshold of a closed door. 
Although the use of storm windows 
was not widespread before the late nine- 
teenth century, several authors of do- 
mestic advice books in the 1830s, in- 
cluding Miss Leslie, point out such 
“double sashes” could be used in north- 
ern climates to increase efficiency in 
domestic heating. Others suggest past- 
ing thick paper over cracks in window 
glass and frames or covering small 
pieces of wood with wool and placing 
them against the sides and bottoms of 
loosely fitting windows. Cracks were 
more commonly stuffed with wool or 
cotton batting or small pieces of cloth, 
but in the spring or during a temporary 
mild spell the wedges of wood were 
certainly easier to remove than were the 
sodden clumps of cloth or batting. 
Heating and cooking stoves were 
known and available in New England in 
the last half of the eighteenth century, 
but few were used until the decades 
after 1 820. It is not altogether clear why 
stoves began to be more widely manu- 
factured and accepted after this date, 
but we know that from that time they 
were used in rural areas as well as in 
cities. Newspaper editors and stove 
manufacturers and dealers urged the 
adoption of stoves for their increased 
efficiency and more reliable heat. Many 
small foundries started casting stoves 
and a flood of new designs with techno- 
logical improvements and decorative 
variations began to revolutionize domes- 
tic heating. Mrs. Royall Tyler may have 
summed up the feelings of many when 
she wrote that she felt “disposed to vote 
for a monument to the memory of the 
first inventor of family stoves; truly the 
people of this age know little of the 
horrors of winter.” 
For all the hardships and inconve- 
niences of a New England winter, it was 
a time when the rigor and tempo of 
agricultural work slackened somewhat 
and people of all ages could look for- 
ward to the pleasures of sociability, 
reading, and indoor recreation. Ample 
snow meant good sleighing, coasting, 
and skating. Many agreed with the au- 
thor who, looking beyond the cold, saw 
that winter was a season “capable of 
being so passed, as to give a great deal of 
instruction, health and pleasure. It is a 
good season for social visiting and par- 
ticularly favorable for reading, study 
and needlework. Then, too, it has our 
venerable Thanksgiving holyday.” Win- 
ter has never been easy, but it is much 
more than shivering and hard work. □ 
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