CHAPTER XII.
FIRESIDE INDUSTRIES.
Around the great glowing fireplace in an old New England kitchen centred the homeliness and picturesqueness of an old-time home. The walls and floor were bare; the furniture was often meagre, plain, and comfortless; the windows were small and ill-fitting; the whole house was draughty and cold; but in the kitchen glowed a beneficent heart that spread warmth and cheer and welcome, and beauty also when
the old rude-furnished room
Burst flower-like into rosy bloom.
The settlers builded great chimneys with ample open hearths, and to those hearths the vast forests supplied plentiful fuel; but as the forests disappeared in the vicinity of the towns, the fireplaces also shrank in size, so that in Franklin’s day he could write of the big chimneys as “the fireplaces of our fathers;” and his inventions for economizing fuel had begun to be regarded as necessities.
The kitchen was the housewife’s domain, the chimney-seat her throne; but the furniture of that throne and the sceptre were far different from the kitchen furnishings of to-day.
We often see fireplaces with hanging cranes in pictures illustrating earliest colonial times, but the crane was unknown in those days. When the seventeenth-century chimney was built, ledges were left on either side, and on them rested the ends of a long heavy pole of green wood, called a lug-pole or back bar. The derivation of the word lug-pole is often given as meaning from lug to lug, as the chimney-side was often called the lug. Whittier wrote:—
And for him who sat by the chimney lug.
Others give it from the old English word lug, to carry; for it was indeed the carrying-pole. It was placed high up in the yawning chimney, with the thought and intent of its being out of reach of the devouring flames, and from it hung a motley collection of hooks of various lengths and weights, sometimes with long rods, sometimes with chains, and rejoicing in various names. Pot-hooks, pot-hangers, pot-hangles, pot-claws, pot-cleps, were one and the same; so also were trammels and crooks. Gib and gibcroke were other titles. Hake was of course the old English for hook:—
On went the boilers till the hake