Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than are such abodes in our day. There were no furnaces, no gas, no bathrooms, no plumbing. Wood was the universal fuel. Coal from Virginia and Rhode Island was little used. All cooking was done in "Dutch ovens," or in "out ovens," or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every household. Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire. In every city, therefore, were men known as "sweeps," whose business it was to clean chimneys.
[Illustration: %Earthenware stove—Moravian%]
[Illustration: %Dutch oven%[1]
[Footnote 1: The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a rim to keep the coals on it.]
[Illustration: a foot stove]
Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.
[Illustration: Kitchen in Washington's headquarters in Morristown,
N.J.[1]
[Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace.
Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old
Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]
[Illustration: A plow used in 1776]
His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves.