Faster Firewood - What We Did In The Old Days

Saw this guys wood kiln on Channel 3 the other night to dry firewood - According to what I am aware of, in order to have dry firewood, you cut it and stack it, then burn it the next year, which is what John Rainville appears to be doing in a photo I took a while back:

The wood kiln that this guy has built, he claims will dry the firewood in 4 days. I had never heard of anyone doing that, but back when I was a kid living on Fairfield Ridge, we kind of did something similar. We never had dry wood. Back in those days we cut the trees down with a cross-cut saw, then into logs and brought them down out of the woods to the back of the house where we had a circle saw run by a one cylinder engine. Of course the logs had to be cut with a cross-cut saw again and sometimes split so they could be lifted on the circle saw table to be cut in firewood length. Some chunks for the Old Round Oak stove and some of the chunks were split to be used in the old Home Comfort kitchen wood stove.

Needless to say, it was indeed very time consuming, along with being a lot of hard work. This, by the way was another reason why we only sugared during the war. We had enough of a problem cutting firewood to keep ourselves warm in the house.

All this of course leads up the the wood drying wood kiln. How did ours work??

Very simple, every night after chores we would bring wood in from the wood shed that had been split for our old Home Comfort kitchen wood stove and stack it in the oven and leave the door open and leave it over night to dry out for the next day. The kitchen stove was kept going all night naturally, and the next morning the dried wood would be put in the wood box, the bark and stuff cleaned out of the oven and the oven door closed up to be used for its cooking purposes during the day. As for the Round Oak living room stove, well we lived with the green wood and creosote caused by it.

By the way, this brings to mind something else - We actually never threw much away - Today you would probably have a whisk broom to clean the chips and debris out of the oven or to push dirt in a dust pan - Big Old Turkey Wings worked just great.

When I saw that wood drying kiln on TV the other night, I thought then, Gee!!, we weren't behind the times, we were ahead of our times.

The above little story is just one more reason when Dad asked me when I graduated from High School, "Do you think you will want to run the farm?"

I replied simply, "I don't think so Dad."

If you want to see the wood kiln this guy built in a video, just click on the link below:

http://www.wcax.com/global/video/popup/pop_playerLaunch.asp?vt1=v&clipFormat=flv&clipId1=2332313&at1=News&h1=Faster Firewood