I was cleaning ashes out the woodstove today and putting aside some of the fireplace tools to carry out onto the porch to polish and get ready for storage for the summer.
Not all of them. Just the ones I don’t use often. I’m mostly done with the wood heat for the year, but there’ll be one or two more fires to light on cool evenings. From here on out it’s just for enjoyment. Just for the beauty.
Anyhow, I was considering my woodstove which is fairly sophisticated as woodstoves go. It’s covered with pretty tile and has fancy corrugations inside that do something about fire efficiency. There’s flues. There's a trap in the bottom to remove ashes while the stove is in operation. There’s thermal insulating rope around the door that has to be replaced every couple of years which is why I know about it. It has a thermal glass door. Thermal glass!
Space age woodstove.
But my array of fireplace tools would settle comfortably next to my Regency heroine’s bedroom hearth. Or Elizabeth Tudor’s hearth. There is a perfection of form and design that’s brought these humble implements through centuries unchanged.
So. What do I have? Leesee ...
A poker. Actually I have two. No idea how I ended up with two but I can’t bring myself to throw out the extra one.
You see, if I were a Regency heroine and were menaced by the villain, I’d bop him over the head with a poker and be perfectly safe.
But what if there were two villains? Huh? What then?
Nobody ever thinks about that.
Now here are a couple of familiar Victorian rabbits sitting on their settle beside the fire. The high back of that long bench is there to catch the heat of the fire and keep it where it will do some good.
At the hearth before them, see the poker slanted up, the hot end toward the fire. It’s the simplest of all poker shapes, just an iron bar with a pointy business end and a knob to hold it by. Probably its twin rested on many a Medieval hearth. It can be found in Aisle 17 at Home Depot today.
And there it is on My Hearth. The same poker. I am part of history. And Art. And Great Literature.
We move on to the little whisk broom hanging from the iron tree that holds my fireplace tools. I sweep up the ashes that get out onto the stone of the hearth and the bits and pieces of logs that fall about when I load up the stove. I suspect there’s a broom just out of sight in all the historical paintings of fireplaces. But it’s not considered a ‘fireplace implement’ by the artists. It’s so humble and ordinary and messy it’s edited out. (Though I have one above.)
What else do I have? A shovel, long and narrow. This is a distinctive sort of shovel, instantly recognizable. Historically, it was used not only for scooping out the dead ashes at cleaning time but also for shifting hot coals from one place to another. We don’t do this so much now, but in 1790 or 1490 the woman of the house might load up her warming pan with hot coals from the fire. Or, since hearths were sometimes big ole affairs in those days, she might take coals from the main fire that was simmering the family frumenty and start a second fire at the other end of the hearth to set the kettle boiling.
Mary Livermore’s autobiography speaks of her girlhood in early Eighteenth Century America. “There were ‘bake-kettles’ for the baking of biscuit and gingerbread over beds of live coals, which also were heaped on the cover.”
I can see the narrow shovel used to heap coals up under the iron pot on the north end of the hearth and then pile coals over the lid.
Livermore says, “The ashes were carefully raked over the bed of coals on the hearth at night to preserve the fire. If we ‘lost fire’, we fell back on the tinder-box, and struck a steel ring with a flint till a spark fell on tinder when it was blown into a flame. Or, if the tinder-box was out of order, we went to a neighbor’s kitchen and begged a shovelful of coals.”
That shovel again.
Next on, I have my bellows. They look quite precisely like these Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century implements, and earlier. No technological improvements here. Mine are made from the same materials — wood, leather, steel nozzle, brass pins to hold everything together.
Finally, and interestingly, we come to a bit of Georgian/Regency fireplace impedimenta I don’t have. Ember tongs. You see them leaning there by the fireplace in the historical picture record. Yet I have them not and do not miss them.
The ember those tongs picked up would have been used to light something else. A candle. A nearby fire. A pipe. I figger we've replace that ember with matches. They still sell the ember tool as part of fireplace sets but I don’t know what folks use them for. I mean, when was the last time you needed to pick up an ember and take it someplace?
So that’s my take on ‘My fireplace tools and what they mean to me’. Thinking about the whole subject I am just flabbergasted at how we’ve kept the shapes and usages for so long. We put a man on the moon in a chariot of 50,000 complicated parts, but our fireplace bellows hasn’t changed in six centuries.
What objects in your physical world are unchanged after many years, even centuries? What connects you to the past?
Your oil painting brush? A thimble? Your garden trowel?
Tell me, and one lucky commenter will receive one of my audiobooks. I have copies of most of them.