Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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Some time ago, our TV was on the Home and Garden channel, I think. They were talking about how it is becoming popular nowadays for homes to have two stoves in the kitchen. They said it is great for people who like to entertain. They were making it sound as if two cook stoves in a home was a new idea.
I thought that was pretty funny because we had two stoves in our kitchen back in the 1930s. One was a coal-burning stove made of cast iron. It was solid black with a couple of nickel-plated decorations, one on the oven door, and another on the stove’s water reservoir.
My Grandmother Tracy had cooked on that stove for years. She started the stove’s fire every day using newspaper and kindling. Then she added coal once the fire got started. She would concentrate the coal in areas where she would be doing the most cooking. If it was going to be a big meal, maybe Thanksgiving, then she had a good supply of coal under each cooking area.
If she was going to bake something that day, she would bank coal around the oven. With no temperature controls, I really don’t know how she baked those wonderful apple pies and peach cobblers in that oven. I guess she just opened the oven door now and then to see how they were doing.
In winter, that stove also helped heat the house. You wouldn’t believe how much heat radiated from it. Unfortunately, it radiated heat like that in summer, too. That’s why we had a second stove in our kitchen, a coal oil stove that was used only during summer.
The stove’s coal oil supply was held in a heavy glass jug, so it was easy to tell when more coal oil was needed. When the supply got low, my grandmother carried the jug to the Sinclair gas station at the corner of Fifth and Maple Streets. They had a hand cranked pump to fill the jug. I don’t recall what the cost was, but I think it was around 15 cents.
Then, sometime in the late 1930s, we got a gas stove. My mother was thrilled, but my grandmother had cooked on that old cast iron stove and the coal oil stove so long, she didn’t want to lose them. She really liked those stoves.
So she and my mother decided to move both of them into the next room. And that’s what they did. Then, for the next few years, we had not two, but THREE cook stoves in our house. My mother and grandmother shared the cooking, using all of those stoves at one time or another.
Who knows? Maybe in a year or so, the Home and Garden Channel may be talking about the advantages of having three stoves in your house. I wouldn’t be surprised because it worked pretty well for us.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at
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