Speaking of the Cold...

I remember the house I was born in, 2167 St. Joseph Street in Detroit. We had three bedrooms, one bath. The bedrooms were very small compared to the bedrooms in the houses now. One was big enough for two beds but that was all. I often wonder how we managed with so little closet and drawer space. We hung our cloths on pegs or nails on the walls. When we went to the Amish country and toured their homes I said to my sister “Remember, that’s how we did it too.” We lived in that house until I graduated from high school.
Compared to what we have now it seems so primitive. We had no central heating. We had a cooking stove in the kitchen and a ‘base burner’ in the dining room which we never used for dining. We ate in the kitchen. In the kitchen we burned soft coal which burned more easily and hotter than hard coal, which we burned in the stove in the dining room. The kitchen stove heated the kitchen, one bedroom that was off the kitchen, and the bathroom, which by the way had only a bathtub and a toilet. There were no cabinets under the sink in the kitchen, mother hung a cloth skirt around it and that was where we kept one pan for washing the dishes and another for washing us. We always washed in the kitchen sink, except on Saturday when we took a bath in the tub in the bathroom. We had a kerosene heater that we heated the bathroom with in the winter.
The ‘base burner’ in the ‘dining room’ heated the dining room and the two bedrooms and the living room, which we only used when we had company. The living room door was closed in the winter to conserve heat.
The dining room stove barely kept the rooms above freezing, so mother would get up early and start a fire in the kitchen stove and when we got up we ran to the kitchen where it was warm and washed, and dressed behind the stove in the kitchen.
We had only cold running water, so there always was a kettle of hot water on the kitchen stove, which also had gas burners for cooking in the summer.
Along one wall in the kitchen there were cabinets. Above the kitchen there was a room. The kitchen had an eight foot ceiling so there was room for a room, but the dining room and living room had a ten foot ceiling so that was just attack space above them where we stored stuff. There was a grate in the floor above the kitchen stove to heat the room above. You had to go out of the kitchen to an enclosed porch to get to the steps to the upstairs room. In the space under the stairs we stored the baseburner in the summer
Under the kitchen we had a cellar. There mom had a two burner stove that she heated the water for washing cloths. We also kept things like potatoes and apples etc. Where it was cold but not freezing. We never had a refrigerator until we moved on Pennsylvania after I graduated from high school We had an icebox where we kept food for a couple days at a time. The iceman came and brought us ice and put it in the icebox and the melted water was caught in a pan under the icebox, which had to be empted every so often or it over flowed.
There were three doors to the outside. A front door, a side door and a back door. Coming in the front door, you entered a small room which we called the front hall. On wall behind the door was room to hang the coats of visitors, and where we hung our winter coats, since there was only one closet in the whole house. As I said we hung our cloths in pegs or nails along the wall, I guess we didn’t have as many cloths then as we have now. There were dressers and we were lucky to get a drawer or two for our under things.
To go to the cellar you had to go outside and down some covered stairs. The walls of the cellar were lined with shelves where mom kept the food she would can for the winter, and also some can goods since there wasn’t much room in the kitchen cabinets. Since we lived in town and there was always someone around, we could go to the store almost daily for meat etc. There was a bakery a half a block away where we got bread and cakes.


On the left, this is what Google says is that address now: an urban "prairie." Below is an old house from down the block, still standing.