Appalachian People How they Heated their Homes back in the day

[Music] do [Music] looks cold and lonely don't and when that old cold wind from the north blow we all try to get in our homes cozy up next to a fire watch television and let winter do its thing but you ever think how our grandparents great-grandparents and their parents lived back in these old appalachian mountains they didn't have no electricity all they had was coal oil or kerosene lamps didn't have no natural gas no propane no indoor running water had to fetch their own from the old spring or the old whale house didn't have no indoor bathrooms either like we do nowadays they had a pretty hard time but we're gonna look at how they heated their homes back in the day and the work it took and how much wood it took to do this [Music] well this is how man has been staying warm since the beginning of time itself nothing's ever changed fire makes heat heat keeps you warm and that's the way it was when they first started out in these old mountains they come into this wilderness trying to hack it out of all these dense trees trying to make a home trying to get a roof over their head they know the wind was coming so they worked hard the whole family did trying to try to put a roof over the head for this winter coming these old mounds and they started out with simple stuff like this little low log cabins clearing a piece of land using the wood off the land to build your cabin and they built all kinds of little cabins too all up and down these mountains and he's hollering some of them look like this according to the size of the family they had at the time sometimes they added on [Music] and they as time went on they had saw meals and they got rough lumber you need to mouth these old logs and they got together and they'd build homes with each other the neighbors would and help each other build these old dog homes at first built stuff simple like this little one-room cabin stones from a creek or on the side of a ridge chipped out to make them a make their chimney here's just what some of them look like a little simple home now here's some of the better ones preserved in the great smoky mountains national park this is a little house on roaring fork you see the old house there's horny cage cove in the great smoky mountains old home a lot of people have passed through here generations now here's how they made the old chimney there's a creek nearby here so they they gathered up stones for a long time and carried them up here and built this chimney piece by piece and by hand still stand today too and here's about what they look like on the inside [Music] nice and cozy big open fireplace generate some heat [Music] that was the center point of the house it's always the fireplace that put out the heat here's just different styles of old fireplaces everybody sit around the fireplace to get more of all styles of all race of people too it didn't matter [Music] like i said the fireplace was the center point of the house and the whole family usually got together around these old fireplaces the family was everything it's just the way it was and to heat these old fireplaces it took a lot of this right here that's a lot of wood right there they would be lucky to get a little one-room cabin through the winter it takes a lot of wood when you're stoking that up hour after hour day after day it adds up [Music] and they started out with little cook stoves like this too wood stove this is how they cook their meals on in these cabins [Music] all different types of little stoves [Music] big stoves little stoves all kinds of little stove wood stoves and he used coal too a little bit here now these are winters was harsh here and they kept these stoves going 24 7 most of the time that kept a lot of the house warm at night and there's some of the old stoves and the prices back in the day how they cost it wasn't nothing better than an old pot of soup beans on the stove cornbread and some fried taters on these old wood stoves seems like they taste so much better i can remember that so well growing up nowadays you cut this firewood you got these chainsaws and they do make it easier but it's still a lot of work does make it easy though but back then it didn't have no chainsaws they'd done most of it after they chopped it down by hand they would cut it with cross saw cut it up into pieces they need for crop with a cross saw a lot of a lot of physical labor i'm telling you here's what the saw they look like that they used the old crossover biggest thing with these is keeping them sharp and i can remember as a little bitty thing that would be certain people that you would take your saws to and they would sharpen them for you they was good at it that was a skill and nowadays here's how i split my wood ain't nothing better than no log splitter that saves you back at arms but they didn't have nothing like that back in them day here's what they used [Music] usually in a wax or a wedge but now these these uh logs split pretty good if they're seasoned if they're green wood oh man it's hard to split they just don't want to split it and here's some of the tools they used back in the day and still use today axes wedge hammers sledge hammers wedges they still use that today that's nothing new here's some of the older totes they used this is physical labor but i still do this myself [Music] and so wood it takes a lot of wood for a winter time people says oh you got to be strong and muscular well yeah it helps but you don't have to be you don't have to be in shape like this to cut split wood many women in these mountains that split wood as good as a man can it didn't matter how big or how small it was i've even seen kids splitting wood just a technique you know [Music] i've seen my grandma many times split wood when i was little so that don't mean nothing male or female they all split and you can see they didn't just do this in the wintertime they've done this all season long all year they prepared for winter months before it even got by [Music] because they bought wood year-round especially cooking [Music] and he didn't matter what color what race she was in these mountains it was up to you to provide for your family and to provide for their livelihood and it was just neighbor helping neighbor that's the way it was in these old mountains and it still is today in a lot of places now here's what a quarter cord a half cord a full cord these are the measurements of the cords of wood that you use and it ain't common just for just a regular little furnace or stove you could use 10 to 20 cords of wood in a winter that's just for a little over 2 000 square foot house now these old houses here [Music] you could see that the chimney's in them is it's all right just for a little house this kind of woods but when they're trying to heat wood places like this back in the old days that place is two-story two chimneys that's at least four fireplaces that one's maybe six fireplaces now that takes a lot of wood old houses like that that's at least four fireplaces in that house in chip and what i'm talking about fireplaces here's a drawing i made this has most places have six to eight in these old big farm houses or plantation houses this is how the chimneys was how the fireplace was how they heated the house some had three chimneys some had just two and you could take this pile of wood right here and a place like that i just showed you in that drawing and you could multiply it times 10 and you might be close to heating that old house it takes a lot of wood a lot of them would just close off most of the house when it got real bad in winter to save wood and they'd all sleep in certain rooms let the rest of the house just stay calm now keep in mind these little houses back a hundred years ago people live back in the country these hollers these mountains they wasn't well insulated nothing insulated at all had a lot of cracks a lot of leaks and they'd get cold real easy so you can see here that a lot of people i've seen a lot of places i'd walk up on these old houses in the middle of nowhere that people's abandoned or died out you know over time they would they would cover their walls inside the house with newspapers because there wasn't no insulation in them days they would use newspaper for insulation to keep the cold air out of the cracks and air coming in and out of the house and losing the warm air and it would amaze me just to look at them it was just like history on the walls you can sit and read i've seen them back to the turn of the century in the teens the 20s 30s even seen some world war ii papers you know pearl harbor i remember seeing that on some of them but i would i'd sit there and just read the history and that really amazed me and you can't tell me these old people and these hollers didn't live hard this is before modern conveniences insulation stuff like that so keep that in mind when you think of these old houses they had a hard time keeping warm i'm telling [Music] and later on they started coal mining way back when they started selling this country and they started using coke block coal they mined it underground and that was good heat i'm telling you people started using that with wood and they would go around they'd sell this block code they'd deliver it to you just like they delivered wood if you ordered it or whatever back in them days they deliver this block call to you and it did cost a little bit of money but not too bad i can remember as a small boy my grandma's house had no warm morning stove like this you put no pud block piece of black coal in there that thing would turn cherry red you had to watch putting that old coal in them stoves some of them stoves just couldn't take it you just put pieces of coal in there you couldn't put a big block of coal in it didn't melt it down and it wasn't nothing growing up in these haulers found a old house had a pile of coal out front with a pile of wood and kindling next to it they used stoves like this these old warm morning stoves all different styles even little old pot belly stoves [Music] wood or cold but the warm mornings they just use coke old stoves like this even though country stores had big old coal stoves in them kept them things cherry red they'd melt you down [Music] even in her churches or communities or get-together halls they they have wood coast dogs in them and these old mining camps these guys worked in the mines but they had to buy the coal most of the time and they hardly barely could afford it with a big old family so they just scraped by making a living in these old mountains a lot of them would go down here at an old scene sticking out next to a creek or holler somewhere and mine it yourself and haul it home it was a lot of work keeping up with the so-called it was nasty too these old people have a hard time they carry this coal up to the house year-round to cook with build the sparring or stoves with a lot of work i have witnessed this many a time i witnessed people picking coal up off the railroad lines here next to the tracks where the trains went by loaded with coal and they'd roll out the top people couldn't afford to buy it so they just pick it up off the railroad and their old school houses back in the day one-room school houses they had no pot belly stove or old cold stove in it they even made their own i have an old 55-gallon drum a little coal and grate in it it put off some heat and i can remember my grandmother tell me about that they would [Music] have to build these little stoves up every morning somebody come in early to build a stove school house now most of these old fields you see out in these valleys and hollers and farmlands they were cleared for pasture fields and they were full of forest so they cut them down and used the wood to build houses bars all kinds of stuff with that's where this would come from but there wasn't nothing better than an old warm bar now i still use an old fire today myself i got an add-on stove i put in my house saves on that old propane tank cause there's no natural gas out here in the rural areas really works well instead of using that propane i just put this in [Music] and it takes cure the heat i never have to cut down a live tree so many dead trees around these woods this is this is might get me by in a winter it takes a lot of wood to eat these old furnaces and stoves all winter long now these old people they live hard and they work for it there wasn't nothing to never give to none of them they either got out and got it or they done without now down days we've got these modern conveniences we've got hot water we've got heat pumps furnaces all automated you don't have to worry about it but you have to worry about paying for that monthly bill and some people that's hard on them i know it's hard on my propane tank that stuff's cheap not cheap i'm telling you so i hope you enjoyed this little video how our elders used to heat their homes and what it took to heat them physically and financially so hope you enjoyed thank you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: DONNIE LAWS

Views: 852,589

Keywords: Appalachian People How they Heated their Homes back in the day, Appalachian Story telling, Appalachian culture, Appalalchian History, Donnie Laws, Home heating, Firewood, Burning Coal, Early Appalachia, Appalachia people, Southern cuture, Mountain people, Winter in Appalachia

Id: 8UXrBN9dJ7k

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022