Carolyn's Blog

If you are in an historic house and are in a room that pretty obviously was the kitchen, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.  Our first picture is of an early 18th Century home near West Grove, Pennsylvania. There is an obvious hearth made of brick, and a large wooden beam forming the front of the opening. It is a little hard to see, but on the left of the back corner, we can see metal eyes where the crane that supported pots over the fire was inserted. On the right side, we can see the opening that once led to the beehive bake oven, long since removed, leaving us a story from the past.

 This next fireplace gets a little harder to identify. It is in the basement of another later Pennsylvania 18th C. home, which I have identified as the original kitchen. You can see how the firebricks at the back arch inward, and a brick hearth is at the front, leaving us another story from the past.

In the next picture is  another basement opening, in an addition probably built in the early to mid 19th C.  What do you think this structure is? You can see that the homeowners have made use of this opening by inserting shelves and if you look above, you can see flexible ductwork inserted between the joists which are made of logs. It is a support arch for the hearth of a fireplace above it. There is no firebrick in the back and no brick hearth on the floor, thus, not a fireplace. Another story from the past.

In the last picture, we see a formal fireplace on the main living level of an 18th C. home, complete with raised panels on the fireplace wall, denoting a level of wealth for the owner of this house. The support arch for this fireplace would have looked like the previous picture, giving us another story from the past.

So we can see that upstairs or down, fireplaces and their supports can help tell us the story of a house even when the people who built it left no written records behind.