This old house
I think this video is kind of fun. My observations follow:
(1) My mother called the refrigerator the icebox for most or maybe even all of her life.
(2) I have very strong memories of transom windows. In particular, they were a feature of my pediatrician’s office waiting room. I found them ominous after that, and still do. I hated that office with its odd medicinal smell.
(3) When I was in law school I lived with four other women in a house with a parlor and a living room. It had only one bathroom, however, which was quite a challenge with five or us.
(4) In my married life I lived in a house that had been built in the 1930s and had what you might call servants’ quarters, although we certainly didn’t have servants. There was a large garage, and over that were two very small rooms and a bathroom, accessed by a special staircase that led from the kitchen.
(5) I don’t have any personal experience of wash basins.
(6) That same house that had the servants’ quarters above the garage had a coal chute in the basement.
(7) I never had knob and tube wiring.
(8) When I was a child we didn’t have a milk door, but we had a milkbox right outside the kitchen door, on the side stoop. It was made out of wood and lined with metal.
(9) Yep, that same house with the servants’ quarters had a butler’s pantry, albeit a rather small one.
(10) Never had a dumbwaiter.
(11) Never had picture rails.
My aunt and uncle had milk delivered to a back porch and it was never homogenized. That way, they could separate off the cream. Their refrigerator had the coils on top, as was common then.
My parents’ house had fixtures for gas lighting, although they were never used. Built in 1912 and electricity was new fangled.
Mike K:
Yes, the milk of my youth wasn’t homogenized. It was in glass bottles with paper tops.
My current home was built in 1910.
Knob-and-tube wiring gets a bad rap, but it came from an era of quality craftsmanship. The 1910 K&T wiring in my home was in far better condition than the fabric-jacketed and aluminum wire that were upgrades over the years.
All of the above was better, and less dangerous, than the Yelp reviewed, Trustpilot confirmed, licensed, bonded, suretied, inspected, etc, electrician that “rewired” the entire house before sale, as the bank wouldn’t lend on it as is. That clown ran Romex from the breaker box into the attic, wire-nutted it all to the in-place wiring, and left a $5000 bill to the estate as proof of work.
I do credit him with jumpstarting my amateur foray into general contracting. I figured as long as I read a book, and remembered that my family slept under this roof, I couldn’t do any worse than that clown.
There’s an extra tingle of satisfaction when the city inspector gives you a “Good job!” along with your inspection sticker. Ditto for other tradesmen…I contracted out HVAC installation and owner asked, who did your electrical work? It looks amazing. Grunt: “Me”.
Older homes are far easier to construct with than today. You can carefully pry shiplap out and reuse it. Try that with drywall.
The only thing I don’t know what to do with is a 50 foot (yes!) deep cistern I discovered in my backyard. The concrete lid is solid, but it’s still a giant hole in the yard, so for now it just sits there. We leave each other alone.
When I visited my maternal grandmother I used her outhouse, her icebox (a real one), and her wash basin. Some of her sons upgraded her to indoor plumbing and a refrigerator when she turned 70.
Our house has most of those, except dumbwaiters (one story). Including the knob and tube wiring. It was built in 1925. Fortunately, my brother understand electrical wiring. (I am useless).
My family always called refrigerators “iceboxes”. And since we were into boats, we always had them aboard. And I too remember the unhomogenized milk delivered daily.
My childhood home had three parts, built in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I don’t recall any of the examples that Neo or the video lists, though it is possible. For example, my father may have replaced knob and tube wiring, though I doubt it.
We did have an outhouse, which was surrounded by lilac bushes. We kept the lawn mowers there.
Well ran dry, so my father paid to have a deeper well dug.
The 19th century part had gingerbread trim on the roof eaves. My father knocked it off.
My father did a lot of work on the house, building cabinets w my grandfather’s assistance, putting in floors, making and installing wood panels- all done in the workshop that used to be a dance hall.
He paid for a contractor to install fireplaces. I don’t recall what was there before, or if the contractor also built a chimney. My guess is that there had previously been a fireplace, which got knocked out, then restored. The brick work around the fireplace was ours.
Circa 1910, my great-grandfather decided to add plumbing and electricity to his house. Instead of working on the current house, he designed and built a new house with plumbing and electricity already installed. Maybe it was cheaper that way. I recall seeing a picture with both the old and the new house. It was a good house- the new house.
Ahh. During WWII we lived with my maternal grandparents. Actually in a one room, plus tiny kitchen, apartment that they had built in the house for another daughter and husband, post WWI. Being independent, Mother insisted on paying rent–$16/mo, which was still significant given war time pay for married enlisted men.
My Grandfather built the bathroom. He also installed an electric pump on the well; and a solar water heating system (warm water heating system.) It was an advanced house for the neighborhood. I recall that the refrigerator had a coil on top. Heated with coal, which was unusual in Florida–but he had been a steam locomotive engineer, and probably loved the smell of burning coal.
I loved that house.
I grew up in a house built in 1911 which was wired in anticipation of REA electrification. It had pushbutton light switches but no exposed wiring. The first house I bought (with first wife) was built about 1920. The wiring had been updated over time but I discovered that the ‘network interface’ for the phone line was two nails with a copper strip between them, after a modem got fried by a lightning strike (this was back in the late 1980s when that wasn’t a trivial expense)
In graduate school, I lived in an old duplex. It had a parlor and living room. I’m not sure what the kitchen had been like, but our kitchen was clearly added on, but much earlier than when I lived there. There was a coal door that would’ve led to the coal chute, long since removed. The swing doors all had transom windows. (The door between the living room and parlor was a double pocket door and did not have a transom.) The house had picture rails — the walls were lath and plaster and it was impossible to drive a nail into them. There were beautiful wooden grates for the heating vents. The bedroom closets were tiny, and clearly not original. I’m sure earlier, people used wardrobes. There were push button light switches but the wiring had clearly been updated. I loved the bathroom. Long, deep tub. Mosaic tile floor. A toilet from pre-low volume flush days…
I move to Oakland and lived in an older apartment building. It still had the icebox, but of course, there was a real refrigerator. In the back of the icebox was a small door (long since sealed) that opened into the service stairs for delivering ice. These small doors were in a lot of California homes built in a certain era. The ice box was great for storing stuff that bugs could get into because bugs could not get into that icebox. There was an ironing board in a small closet.
I live in a house built in 1993 that has a dumbwaiter. I sheetrocked its doors over when I bought it, out of fear my then-young kids would play in it, maybe get stuck between floors. An ounce of prevention!
Unless you enjoy lugging heavy loads up/down stairs, dumbwaiters are not an antique idea. My kids are well-grown and gone, so the dumbwaiter is not needed, since i live and sleep downstairs in the “master” bedroom, do not go upstairs, and my housekeeper goes up the stairs to dust and vaccuum once weekly.But the upstairs bedrooms are there if, rarely, one of my children shows up, e.g. for Christmas. Never understood why the builders of this house slept downstairs, their kids up on 2nd floor: what if there’s a fire?
Insurance is becoming a challenge with older wiring.
When I was a kid, we lived in a new house, but we lived in a tiny rural town. We had a milk box on the front step and got our homogenized milk delivered there. Kept a spare key under the box. Like a burglar would’ve never figured that out!
A number of my friends who lived on farms still had outhouses when I was in first or second grade, but most of them, their families had bathrooms installed by third grade. Funny, Amish have moved into a lot of those homes. I’m sure digging new outhouses for them could’ve been a little… Interesting.
When I lived in NYC, I had a friend who lived with numerous other people, sharing an apartment in an older building that had not been renovated much. He got the servant’s room, just off the kitchen. It had its own bathroom, but the bathroom was really just a water closet with a sink. I guess servants were expected to bath elsewhere, and just do sink baths when living with the family. It was a tiny room and a tiny bathroom. It opened off the short hallway that lead from the service stairs to the kitchen. I don’t remember much of the rest of the apartment. (The living room had been taken over as a bedroom for one of the roommates, and most visitors were entertained in the kitchen.)
Until I was seven, we had a real ice box. The icehouse was about a quatre mile from our house. My older brother and I were tasked with taking our wagon over to the icehouse fora block of ice.
Knob and tube wiring was the standard when I was a kid. My father and grandfather were both electricians. It was replaced by conduit in the 1940s. It was metal pipe that the wires were fished through. It had to be bent to fit around corners, and that took some skill. My grandfather weas a master at it. He never crimped a piece of conduit when he was bending it that I saw. BX cable (flexible metal sheathed wires) followed that. It was faster to install and had great longevity.
My maternal grandparents house was a two-story rooming house. The main floor was where my grandparents lived. There were five rooms with a shared bath on the floor above. There was a coal fired furnace in the basement with a coal chute. I often helped my grandfather stoke the furnace from the coal bin. Sometime after WWII he got a device that fed the coal in automatically.
They had a laundry room in the basement and there was a laundry chute from the upper floors. Those laundry chutes were pretty common back in the day.
My paternal grandparents lived on a farm. They had no electricity until after WWII. The water was hand-pumped into a wash basin in the kitchen. There was an outhouse, and a small room called a bathroom with a wash basin and a big metal tub that was used for baths. Bath day was once a week and lots of hot water had to be heated on the stove. (fired with corncobs and coal) It was a different life, and I was in awe of how they carried on in such good spirits. After they got electricity, they felt like they had hit the jackpot.
We’ve come a far piece from those days.
heck, I still call my refrig. an icebox, though I never had an icebox, and my kids know what I’m referring to.
How about growing up in South Texas before A/C, where summer temps are often 100+. Homes were smaller then, ceilings much higher.
Ain’t got no rain barrel.
Ain’t got no cellar door.
But we’ll be jolly friends
Forevermore.
I remember listening to a novel by Robertson Davies in which he explained that the class system was reinforced by the fact that the servants always had to empty out the masters’ slop buckets. Knowing that may give one a different view of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “Downton Abbey,” “The Gilded Age,” and other historical dramas.
My late father grew up in a log cabin sans running water and electricity up the Mohawk Valley northeast of Eugene. After my father evaded the draft by enlisting in the USAF, my grandfather became the superintendent of maintenance for the Springfield school district and they moved into a normal house. My father went from hillbilly to Strategic Air Command computer expert.
My uncle grew up in Central Illinois. Didn’t get electricity until the late 1930s. Which is about when my grandparents in rural Oklahoma got electricity.
Last summer in Central Texas had about 2 months of 100 degrees. My AC conked out. I had about a month without AC. It got to 90 inside, and cooled down to 85 at night with fans running full blast. (Some AC contractors made a real killing that summer, I’m told. But not off me.)
I would like to live in a basement to beat the heat, which would also beat the cold in winter.
I remember my Grandparents house in Central IL. This would be in the mid 1950’s to early 60’s. Main part was Log Cabin, maybe in the mid 1850’s to maybe mid 1860’s, don’t really know. It was moved onsite from somewhere else. No indoor plumbing, did have electricity, small refrigerator. By the front door was a stand with a wash basin, and a water “bucket” with a dipper. Had to go out and pump the water from the well. It really tasted good. Heated water on the stove, I think it might have been a wood or coal burning stove early in my memory. The main part was really one big room downstairs and a big room upstairs. My Brother and I would sleep up there. Main room had a big Pot Belly Stove, coal fired. Don’t know when another room was added, it was kitchen and eating area. A small room was added sometime too, prior to 1940 because my Brother was born there. Yes, an outhouse.
We have a room I call The Parlor (OK, I am old) and a Family Room where we watch TV. We expanded the FR over 20yrs ago, tripled it’s size.
I remember seeing Transom windows, don’t know where.
When we built the house I thought of a Dirty Close shut, but didn’t put one in.
Yes we have a Servants Quarters – my Den. Interpret that.
I’ve spent the summer on the combined site of the LDS handcart pioneer story and the historic Sun Ranch, the first one homesteaded on the Sweetwater River in Wyoming.
Tom Sun Sr. founded it in 1872, and many of the ranch-era buildings are still on the site, most in their original locations, although a couple of cabins were moved in from out-lying areas to hold museum-style exhibits. All were single-level examples of rural living, so there is none of the fancy stuff in the video.
We have one cabin known as the “bunk room” outfitted for the ranch foreman and his wife. A double bed instead of bunks, with rope webbing supporting a “mattress” made of pillows stitched together, hiding a chamber pot underneath. Gives new perspective to the proverb about “sleeping tight.”
Another cabin was the original wash house, and is filled with the remnants of “cutting edge technology” in the laundry business. Double-tubs with wringers in-between were a notable improvement over the single tub with washboard. An early washing machine featured a hand-cranked variant of butter-churn paddles inside a wooden tub with a lid. We also have one of the earliest electric washers, still equipped with external wringers.
The exhibit also includes a metal bathtub of antique style, which often has our school tour kids asking why we have a coffin in there.
No running water, although there was eventually access to a well with one of those old vertical pipes around 3 feet tall with a handle-operated faucet on top.
The ranch is about half-way between Rawlins and Casper (50 miles each direction), and didn’t get landline phones until 1970 – they had mobile phones a decade earlier!
Electric power was via a bank of diesel generators until after WW2, I don’t remember the exact date.
The main house grew from the homesteader’s log cabin with successive room additions, having log construction about 3/4ths of the way, then planked lumber for the final room, the parlor where the family treasures were displayed. Also no running water, which made its later use as the ranch mess-hall somewhat challenging. The family members still living on the ranch built modern houses at various locations on the homestead’s periphery, sometime in the middle of the 20th century.
One of the parlor showpieces is a fireplace constructed in the early 1940s from rocks & minerals, petrified wood, fossilized coral & clams from the great inland sea period, a petrified mammoth tusk (my favorite!), and Indian artifacts like grinding stones (metates) and round-rock hammers. It has four grates at strategic locations to allow the hot air to circulate into the room, and I think is decidedly unique.
If you’re ever in Wyoming, come on by, and be grateful for the way we don’t live anymore!
Here’s Part 2 of the series, including more stuff I remember from my grandparents’ day, although none of the really posh things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nheMuFZqsI
The house I grew up (1950s) in had a phone nook, but it was nothing fancy, just where the phone was. The house I live in now was built in the 1930s and still has some knob & tube wiring in service. My Dad installed it for the REA (Rural Electrification Association) in farms in northern Idaho & eastern Washington in the 1930s.
My grandmother didn’t drive and her neighbor would come and get her on a tractor to go get the mail. They had to cross a covered bridge. The bridge was used in the Jimmy Stewart movie “Shenandoah”. The Mohawk Valley stood in for the Shenandoah.
A room purposed for conversation. Glory be.
One of my professors in undergraduate school told us there would be no pop quizzes unless he entered the room thru the transom. Sure enough, with the aid of a ladder, he entered in that fashion and presented us with a quiz. We did not appreciate his sense of humor.
The video did not mention rotary phones; we had one at home (an apartment in a NYC borough) until about 1970 or so. True, a phone is not really a built-in feature of any home.
We also had a milk box by our front door where milk was delivered and empty milk bottles placed. By about 1960 or so, that came to an end.
Was in Manhattan a few years back – about 10 years ago or so – on 9th?, 10th? Ave between 40th and 50th, and I actually saw a coal chute that was still in use. I was amazed to see it; didn’t think anyone used coal anymore for heating.
I notice they didn’t mention the chamber pot or “Night Bucket” that was also used before indoor plumbing.
A few years ago, I assisted a friend in rewiring a house he’d bought that still had knob and tube wiring. The biggest problem with that style of wiring with modern systems is that there was no ground; just hot and neutral wires, so if you want to use grounded outlets, you have to rewire, or run independent grounds. We rewired the whole house.
Without reading other comments – the dumbwaiter was invented in the late 19th century? Pretty sure Monticello has one, and I always heard that they were a Jeffersonian invention.
Our first house had knob and tube wiring. We couldn’t afford to get it redone, so I suppose we were living at constant risk.
I’m also surprised they didn’t mention laundry chutes. My grandparents’ house had one – we always wanted to put my brother down it, but thankfully always chickened out, since his safety would entirely depend on whether it was laundry day, with a nice big pile of laundry at the bottom in the laundry room for him to land on.
I’m nearly 80. As a child we had a milk man. I clearly remember my grandmother had an ice box and ice delivery. I loved it because she kept the milk directly leaning against the ice and it was very cold. Her house had transom windows, a parlor w/ piano and a milk door ( not used (she had her milk delivered to her porch) and changed into a doggie door for her beloved pet).
In many ways those were better times. Slower, for sure.
Our first house was an old bungalow in Milwaukee. It had a laundry chute in an upstairs closet. Our cat found the lid, dislodged it, and went down the chute to the basement, yowling all the way. He was indignant but okay.
Kate: I’m currently doing work in the family house in western Mass., a 1950s split-level ranch with a laundry chute in an upstairs closet. I’m careful to keep it covered so Mr. Cat, a very thorough and inquisitive domestic shorthair male, can’t do what your family cat did. Fortunately, he is lounging in a patch of early fall sunlight on the front porch and is not in exploration mode at the moment.
My parents grew up in triple-decker row houses in Boston in the 1920s-1930s. They recalled coal chutes, ice deliveries, and milk boxes. Also junkmen and knife-sharpeners. By the way, triple-deckers–which are common in Boston but can be found in other cities in Massachusetts and throughout New England–are known colloquially as “Irish Battleships”. Explanation here:
https://cranberrycountymagazine.blogspot.com/2017/01/exploring-glossary-of-boston-slangs.html
Similar to those “Irish Battleships” in Philly stand quite a few elderly (circa 1800s+) row houses dubbed “Trinities”, father, son and holy ghost; narrower stairs it’s difficult to conceive, with the larger furnitures requiring either disassembly or hoisting from the exterior through a de-sashed window.
My aunt and uncle’s house was built about 1880 and had coal to heat. I remember when my uncle installed an automatic coal device called “An Iron Fireman.”
A funny story about oil heating, I lived in New Hampshire 1994-5 and the house I rented had oil heating. Not far from me, another home owner had converted from oil to gas but left the oil fill pipe in place although the tank was removed. A confused oil delivery man filled his basement with 400 gallons of heating oil.
My Issaquah house has a laundry chute from the child’s bathroom on the third floor to the laundry in the daylight basement. Building inspector says it should be blocked off as a fire hazard.
When I was a kid, we had NO dial on our phone. Our phone number was four/five digits. You clicked the receiver to get an operator. It was four digits in that exchange, and if we were calling another exchange, you added the first digit which was a fifth digit. The other exchanges were for other like tiny rural towns around there. The nearby “big city” had seven digit phone numbers. They could dial people directly. We were one of the first people in our town to NOT have a party line. Even when we all got rotary phones, we could still dial just the for digits in that exchange for a number of years. (BTW, I’m in my early sixties.)
Chases Eagles — current laundry chutes, whether commercial or residential, now have fire suppression systems. Which means that they’re only affordable for the wealthy now
In 1955, my husband’s parents were thrilled to be able to buy their first apartment (condo) in a newly constructed block of apartments close to Paris One of the best features was the included toilet and bathtub: it was the first time that they didn’t have to share the toilets with neighbors, and the first time that they didn’t have to go to the municipal “bains-douches” to wash up. Although the building was plumbed for gas, most chose coal for a primary heating source due to the cost difference. The coal was stored in the basement, and many of their neighbors used their tub to store coal in order to avoid the trek up and down flights of stairs. My mother-in-law lived in this 660 sq ft apt. (where she raised my husband and his 3 siblings) until she passed away several years ago. My children used to laugh when people believed that growing up in Paris was glamorous. The reality was otherwise: however, the neighborhood had much going for it, and my husband had a happy childhood.
I grew up in Massachusetts, in a home built in the 60s, and we had a laundry chute, which was a great escape, particularly when playing hide and seek. When I was a child, my grandmother still had an icebox, a coal burning stove in the kitchen, and weekly milk and fish deliveries.
Amazingly, I haven’t lived in an older house since 1955 or so. Same with my late parents, except for the house that they bought in 1985, that had been built in 1976. It has a laundry shoot that is never used. My youngest brother still lives there. The one I grew up in, starting in 1960, had a laundry shoot and milk door into the kitchen. My next brother could fit through both, which was handy when we didn’t have a door key. Just open the outside door, jiggle the inside one enough, and he was in.
My parents both grew up in upscale houses in nice neighborhoods. Father’s had a coal shoot, dumb waitor, parlor, and a room upstairs for their help. Until his uncle and aunt died, and his cousin moved into that room, for high school. Still a beautiful house, despite having been built probably in the 1920s. They could afford a housekeeper, since my grandmother always worked. By then, she was teaching at the University of Denver School of Commerce (now the Daniels B School). My mother grew up in Oak Park, IL, surrounded by Frank Loyd Wright houses. They didn’t have any servant quarters, but maybe some of the other amenities. Until WW II, when my grandfather was the CO of several Army camps, and help came with the job.
That grandfather grew up in the biggest house in Benzonia, MI. I remember visiting my GReat Grandmother there. Huge 2 story house with a basement that she lived in alone. It had most of the amenities in the video. But the one I most remember was the heating system rattling periodically. Probably had switched from coil over to oil by then.
Have good friends, even now, who grew up in Lake Forest. IL. Their house had all the bells and whistles. 5 bedrooms for the family (and one guest), plus three bedrooms for servants. Used to have a door between family and servant quarters, but they used the back stairway too much, so it was removed Back stairway went to the kitchen from the servant quarters. And it had a door, hidden by a mirror, into the dining room. There was also a butler’s pantry too. Main stairway went from the entry up to the family quarters, and into the living room. For everyone’s fun, there was both a dumb waiter and elevator. Basement was massive, but mostly empty, but you could see where the coal had been.
I grew up at the outskirts of a small city in a house built in the 1960s. It had a clothes chute in the only bathroom that ran down to the laundry area in the basement. It was built into the bathroom cabinet. The leftmost cabinet door was hinged on the bottom instead of the side. It was way too heavy for a cat to open.
When you dumped your clothes into the chute, they fell to the basement and landed in a fabric bag hanging from the rafters next to the washing machine. There was a zipper at the bottom of the bag for my mom to empty it without removing it from the hooks.
That house also had oil heat, a septic tank, a semi-private well shared by four other houses, and a rotary phone hanging from the wall connected to a party line. There was no curb & gutter on the two-lane rural asphalt road out front. Every front yard had a ditch, and storm water from the entire road flowed from house to house through corrugated pipes under our driveways. No one thought any of that was odd at the time, but I bet kids now would think differently.
J.J./Cicero. The last summer I spent on the farm of my Aunt and Uncle in Suwanee County, Fl. was 1947. Still no electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, telephones or any of the other modern necessities.
The folks who want to force us back into a similar life style don’t know what they missed.
They would not like it. In fact, I doubt that most could cope.
That leads to a comment about government regulation–even back then. Tobacco was the only viable cash crop for most of those farmers. The logistics of marketing anything else, exacerbated by marginal soil, ruled out most alternatives. FDR era Regulators imposed a limit of three acres of tobacco on a farm of my Uncle’s size. Life was tough for those folks, and even tougher when they could only utilize a small percentage of their land for income.
I wondered if there might be a Sunday post on the latest assassination attempt. Too soon? Maybe later?
There’s a lot of crazed Democrats roaming around, needing (perhaps wanting) quality attention or to be put out of their misery. Another day, another you-know-what. Ho-hum at this point?
Poor things
https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/shooting-reported-at-donald-trumps-golf-club-while-ex-president-was-on-grounds/
I mistakenly posted this in the Kamala interview thread.
https://youtu.be/vBfBeo4nI2A?si=nFg4yEeIYO3yvbg5
Banned Lizard:
I just put up a thread for the assassination attempt.
I’m in my 80’s so I’ve personal experience with most of that stuff except for anything dealing with servant’s quarters. We were too poor, but I probably had older relatives who were servants. That wasn’t anything that would be mentioned by people who had dragged themselves into lower middle/working class.
In my parent’s 40s era semi-rural bungalow, only the bathroom drains were plumbed to the septic tank. The gray water from the kitchen drain was plumbed to the drainage ditch along the dirt road out front.
Amusing factoid: chamber pots also had the rather descriptive nickname of “thunder mug”.
@ Someone Else > “When I was a kid, we had NO dial on our phone.”
The museum I described earlier has the old ranch phone without numbered holes on the dial, just a crank handle on the outer edge. I suppose turning the crank served the same purpose as clicking the receiver.
@ buddhaha > “chamber pots also had the rather descriptive nickname of “thunder mug”.”
When we show visitors the pot under the bed in our bunk house exhibit (see my comment earlier), some of them have provided other euphemisms for it. Honey bucket is one I remember hearing.
https://blog.wordnik.com/a-brief-history-of-lavatory-language
1 — Transom windows. I can’t believe they did not mention two aspects —
a — they required high ceilings that today’s air conditioned buildings lack.
b — they were set high (and the high ceilings existed) to allow hot air when it was warm to rise away from the living space, and the transoms allowed the warmer air to be fed out of the house specifically.
Side observation —
Old Four-poster beds usually had removable knobs on each post. What was at least *A* use for them? Well, back in the days before everyone stayed in hotels and motels, and instead stayed with people you knew, sometimes distantly… As the guest wore out their welcome, you would remove a knob. By the time all four of the knobs were gone, it basically meant, “GTFO”.
The feature is still found, but almost no one knows this purpose.
My mother’s first home (1970, I was 10) was built in 1926, and had stucco walls, purportedly stronger than cinderblock. I recall it had a fireplace with a “Heatilator” — basically it had intake vents on either side of the fireplace and an outflow vent above, but below the mantle… there was a copper plate inside which the main heat from the fireplace went up and past before going out the chimney. That sucker gave off serious warmth into the room. Since we were in Florida, our heating bills were nonexistent thanks to that device.
One of my jobs as a kid was to do by a nearby lumberyard on my bike (they built trusses) and grab a bunch of scrap wood pieces they tossed away (probably never let a kid near it these days for liability reasons) and load up the panniers on my bike with wood for the fire each night. No, none of it was treated, back then, so it was safe to burn.
Funny thing is, the house was on the edge of the glidepath for the semi-major airport, so a huge swathe of the neighborhood was bought by the county to resolve noise complaints, and torn down.
That house is still there, as it was the last house on that block that wasn’t torn down by the county.
As to iceboxes, my GF lived in Iowa for much of his early adult life (b 1905), moved to FL ca. 1955 permanently (he used to visit Florida quite regularly), and one of his jobs when a young man was to keep and deliver ice for ice boxes (as typical of the time, it was not his only effort to make and keep an income). In fact, I have a post card sent to him in 1947, from friend staying at a motel just outside Gainesville, FL, on 441 (it still existed until about 20y ago), the Bambi Motel. It was addressed to
Beebe The Ice Man
Sumner, Iowa
And, back then, it actually got delivered.
}}} Never understood why the builders of this house slept downstairs, their kids up on 2nd floor: what if there’s a fire?
I’m going to make a guess in one word: Noise. This is one reason many ranch-style homes build from the 70s onward have a master bedroom on one side of the house, and all the other bedrooms on the other side. Gives the parents a chance for peace and quiet at night.
Just out of curiosity — are any of the upstairs bedrooms right over the master bedroom?
Ah, yes. That house built in 1926 also had had a room added to it at some point after the fact. There was an actual window between my bedroom (it was 2br) and the addition. When still fairly young I would sometimes go into the room via that window from the addition.
We referred to the addition as “The Florida Room”, and was equivalent to a parlor. The “living room” was, not unsurprisingly, where the fireplace was located, and was used for entertaining for anything other than TV, which is where the Florida Room came into play. Part of this was the fact that the TV antenna was right outside that door (the cable connection was added right there, later, too). The main couch and other chairs, along with the cabinet stereo (remember those?) were all in the “living room” and not the “Florida room”.
Jamie:
You got me curious…
From the wiki:
No mention of Jefferson.
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Another thing I recall, was the University of Florida’s administration building, Tigert Hall — built ca. 1948, it had, until a major renovation about 25y ago, an actual phone booth in the main lobby area. We are talking about the classic kind that Superman would have changed in, with a wooden exterior door and which was actually set into the wall space.
Also notable about the building is that the main construction material is 10″x10″x3″ red (“Georgia”) clay “cinder blocks”.
The walls of the building are a double-wall structure with about a 3″ or so space between the two sets of blocks. From what I understand, these were used for about 10 years or so during about the time that building was constructed. Previous efforts in the school’s buildings were either brick or, later, “modern” cinder blocks with bricks as the exterior facings.
BTW, bricks are pretty standardized today with bricks a 3 courses for 8″. There is, however, at least one building on the campus where it is 3 courses for 9″. I kinda found that out the hard way when making a 3d model of Anderson Hall (1910) and everything was somehow way off, given that I had counted courses and used 8″/3 instead of the 9, which added up to multiple feet off by the time I reached the windows on the 3rd floor. This was at odds with some hard actual numbers I’d been able to get using a long tape measure at one spot to give me true floor levels. 😀
Anderson Hall got onto the National Register of Historic Places, so, in the mid 1990s, UF was looking to restore it to as close as possible to its state in 1910 — while they also brought it up to modern Handicapped — and Fire — codes. The solution to this was to provide a standalone structure on one side which housed elevators, rampways, and bathrooms while the rest of the building mostly got restored to its 1910 state.
This also led to the entire top floor being renovated, which had been closed down ca. 1979 due to a fire. It was interesting moving around that space and taking measurements, because there was something… eerie about it, and I finally figured out what it was — it was abandoned — Humans don’t usually abandon spaces, we expand constantly. So a space we have abandoned has an odd sense to it. There were actual jokes still on the chalkboards about Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter. 😛
If they are going to mention wash basins with pitchers, they should also mention bedpans. Folks didn’t traipse off to the outhouse in the middle of the night 🙂 Emptying the bedpans was a job for the kids 🙂
I lived in a house built in 1916, it had knob and tube wiring and had been through several heating upgrades, starting with stoves in several rooms with chimneys and a fireplace, improving to a coal furnace in the basement with a single large vent in the center of the house, and finishing with a gas furnace. The plumbing also went through upgrades with the addition of an indoor toilet and running water around 1952. It was kind of a mess, and while I redid the wiring and some of the plumbing, I’m not a professional by any means. If I had it to do again, I’d hire professionals for a thorough redo. That house is still in use.