[Magdalen] How do you buy a stove?

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

Kitchens in even typical merchants' houses were very frequently in a
separate building out of concern for the risk of fire.

Just visited a Palatine home of old Rhinebeck from the 1700s. The original
room was made into the kitchen for a later building which is to one side.
Eventually the two were joined together and after wards more rooms added,
later ca. 1830.  It was a merchant's house in the middle of Rhinebeck, but
now it's isolated. Rhinebeck has moved down the road a couple miles.  A
church just south of the home has vanished, leaving its tiny graveyard
behind. The parish moved up the road and a much newer building stands just
west of Rt. 9 (the Albany Post Road).  It's kind of fascinating to ride
along a road such as Rt. 9 or Rt. 22, and see a road branch off at a narrow
angle, almost unfailingly sporting the sign "Old Rt. 9," or "Old Rt. 22".
Within a few miles, another road comes in from that side, being the other
end of the original road.

Go along these old country roads and if you watch closely, all of a sudden
you will spot a place with lilacs. It may be a small line, or it may be
literally two bushes, one for each side of the doorway. Look very closely
and you may still make out the outline of the old farmhouse that once stood
there with lilacs at the front door. Going over the hill toward Connecticut
on my way to work at the old Psych Center, I learned to spot several of
these. I could go there today and pick them out. The ground is so rocky and
hilly that they will not be developed any time soon.

Looking at the topography, it somewhat horrifies me that people once tried
to eke a living out of this land.  One can say the same about the land in
Western PA where I grew up. The land has not a single scrap of original
forest. It all was cut, back in the day. All that huge, rich forest of
Pennsylvania, save a couple square miles, is second growth from the first
cutting back. Much was cut for farmland; the rest was clear-cut by timber
barons.

Now reclaimed, we have vast tracts of forest...

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Roger Stokes <roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com>
wrote:

> On 03/08/2015 16:28, ME Michaud wrote:
>
>> A friend visited Mount Vernon and noticed the kitchen was in a separate
>> building. Did the residents find the aromas of cooking so unpleasant they
>> had to take the kitchen out of the house? he wondered. More likely that
>> kitchens were hot and dangerous places that caught fire more than once in
>> each person's lifetime.
>>
>
> I was used to that sirt of arrangement in historic houses in England so
> wasn't surprised to see it in Mount Vernon when I visited.  They were
> separate because of the risk of fire as well as the fact that they needed a
> high ceiling so the cooks weren't working in a cloud of smoke.  Of course
> one downside was that you needed fast footmen to ferry the food to the
> dining hall before it got cold.
>
> Roger
>