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Home Fires
AROUND 1912 Junie Sullivan, my grandfather, left his father's farm in Stafford County, Virginia, and came five miles across the Rapppahannock River to Fredericksburg. On two lots that cost ten dollars each, he and Inis brother Burley built a two-storey, four-room house. Like the common Irishmen that they were, they were also common workers: farmers, railroad hands, carpenters, distillers, roofers, painters. The house was solid and in its original form well-proportioned. By the time I was born thirty years later, the house had been expanded along its left or west side. The new sections included a middle parlor room, adjoining bath, pantry, kitchen, and enclosed back porch. Under the kitchen had been dug a cellar for the canning jars and potatoes, and the cellar roof had been covered over by a lattice porch. Later we built a summer porch along the front of the parlor and kitchen.
Although the house was trim, square, and snug, the work of competent carpenters, it was built in the days before wall insu- lation. In the summer the silver maples across the front on the south side of the house shaded the porch, and in the evening, we opened the windows and a single electric fan moved the air. In the winter there was little between the cold and the heart but double wallboards and two wood stoves. One of these stoves was in the kitchen, the other in the parlor, and they made the only heat we knew through the winter. The kitchen stove was the day stove. This was the first stove lighted in the early morning and the one kept burning through the day. The parlor stove was not lighted until evening. These were not potbelly stoves but squat elongated stoves with a rectangular firebox and flat tops on which a kettle of water always sat. The kettle kept water hot for tea or coffee and added humidity to the hot dry air of the rooms. Some days a pot of soup or stew was cooked on the top of the kitchen stove.
Behind the house was a nest of wooden buildings, sheds we called them, that housed chickens, feed, tools, and much else. There was a smokehouse with a dirt floor, fire pit,...