Warm Memories of Our Coal Furnace
It may seem odd to some that an inanimate piece of mechanical equipment could spark fond memories. But replace “coal furnace” with “first car” and you’ll gain a sense of what I mean. In its day, our old coal furnace kept us warm, but to my grandfather, it was his Cadillac.
Hazleton is my hometown, a city built on a corrugated mountain plateau in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. While growing up in the late 1950s and the 1960s it was a city of about 30,000; a city defined by coal and a city overcoming the decline of the coal industry. By 1830, the stage had been set for what would eventually become large-scale mining enabled by a workforce from the many surrounding small villages and towns that make up the Greater Hazleton area. The coal industry had progressed from dangerous, labor-intensive underground deep mining to surface strip mining where heavy equipment could do in a day what a miner could do in a week. The area was a mosaic of nationalities represented by the descendants of those who exchanged old world poverty for work in the mines. In my youth, Hazleton’s identity was largely Italian or so it seemed given my neighborhood friends, my classmates, our priests, and our local newspaper coverage. When I’m asked what it was like to grow up there, I reply, “It was like Mayberry but with meatballs.”
My childhood home on North Vine Street was a wood frame, two story duplex. My parents, siblings, and I lived in one half and our mother’s parents lived in the other half; three generations, old world and new, connected by much more than the door between our basements. In 1969, during remodeling, my father removed the last layer of old wallpaper from above the front door to reveal in penciled script: “Built 1898.” Our home was one of many similar style houses in the “Diamond Addition.” Unlike downtown Hazleton’s rapid growth after coal’s discovery, this orderly residential district north of Diamond Avenue civilized a wooded, rocky and, fortuitously, stable bedrock ridge not underlain by deep mines. When built, our home had neither central heating nor indoor plumbing, just a coal cook stove in the kitchen and an outhouse in the backyard.
My great-grandfather bought our house in the early 1920s. One of the three upstairs bedrooms had already been divided to create a smaller bedroom and a small bathroom with indoor plumbing. Central heat had also been added with a basement coal furnace that supplied hot water to cast iron radiators added to each room. There was no convenient way to route the hot water pipes to the radiators, so two parallel pipes, running from the basement to the attic were exposed on one wall in every room. The furnace, a hand-fired, upright cylinder-shaped unit about the size of a 1940s-era refrigerator was wrapped in a white, asbestos-cement insulating shell. It burned an angular coal nearly the size of gravel used to make concrete and was shoveled by hand onto metal grates in the fire box. A crank-like handle on the front of the furnace, when toggled back and forth, rocked the grates, which allowed the finer coal ash to drop into a removable metal tub. More coal was added, and this daily process repeated. Having indoor plumbing and central heat would have been a luxury for my great-grandparents when they first settled in the village of Lattimer No. 2 and rented a primitive, mining company-owned duplex with no indoor amenities.
My grandfather was an anthracite miner who retired in 1963 after working underground for the better part of 43 years. He was a contract miner for the Lehigh Valley Coal Company at Hazle Mines in the No. 1 slope mine that stood where the Hazleton Shopping Center now stands on West Broad Street. In August of 1955, torrential rains from the back-to-back hurricanes, Connie and Diane, brought flooding that hastened the demise of the area’s deep mines. After a time, deep mining resumed on a small scale by an independent operator who leased the mine and my grandfather returned to work. I remember my father taking my grandmother and six-year-old me to pick up my grandfather after work. My grandfather never owned a car and never learned to drive. He either walked to work or rode with his mining buddy. At the end of a shift, the miners shed their wet, dirty work clothes and showered in the washhouse. I can vividly picture their heavy clothes and boots hanging from grappling hooks beneath wire baskets hoisted high in the washhouse ceiling to dry, ready for the next day’s work.
In the early 1950s, my grandfather replaced the hand-fired furnace with an automatic coal stoker that ended the daily routine of shoveling and shaking. This new, boxy metal unit was about the size of two modern side-by-side refrigerators. On one end was the coal hopper that he filled with several days’ worth of rice-sized coal. The stoker automatically fed (stoked) coal into the firebox at a rate needed to produce the heat called for by the upstairs thermostat. A fan blew air into the firebox for a more complete burn. A small metal door allowed you to peer into the firebox and view the steady orange-yellow flame with tinges of blue. At times, my grandfather used the stoker like a blacksmith’s forge to heat metal to an orange glow that he would then shape with a heavy hammer using a 12-inch length of railroad rail as an anvil. The stoker also served as a crematory for the occasional basement mouse and for our hamsters when they passed.
Next to the hopper, in a corner of the basement, was the coal storage bin. Several times a year a small dump truck with a metal chute filled the bin through a basement window near sidewalk level. An old wooden chair placed at the curb was the universal sign that the parking space was reserved for a coal delivery. The coal bin was a small room about ten feet square and five feet tall to the bottom of the delivery window and held about ten tons of coal when full. I raked the coal from the far corners of the bin toward the stoker, where my grandfather scooped it into buckets to fill the hopper.
The consumed coal produced a coarse gritty ash. If you listened for it, a muffled "clunk" could be heard upstairs, signaling that the stoker below had automatically shaken the ash from the grate and into the ash tub. The grey, galvanized metal tubs were about 2-feet square and 1.5-feet tall. A large, heavy door at the bottom of the stoker supplied access to the filled tub, which we rolled noisily across the basement floor on a dolly my grandfather made from scrap wood, metal roller skate wheels and a piece of rope as a pull handle. Once a week or so, my grandfather carried the tubs to the curb for pickup.
The city did not collect ashes like they did weekly garbage. A fleet of independent, private ash haulers did the collection. We used "Ernie the ashman," who had a helper and a small, well-used dump truck. For twenty-five cents per tub, they would heave the tubs and tip them into the back of the dump truck with a puff of dust. We called the ash “cinders,” and in the winter we spread some on slick sidewalks to prevent falls. The city also spread cinders on the streets to improve traction. As plows cleared the streets after each snowfall, banks of black, gritty snow rose high along the curb, some years as high as three feet or more. In the spring after the banks melted, the city’s mechanical street sweeper would remove the gritty ash that remained.
My grandfather tended the stoker the same way someone would care for a large purchase, like a car. He routinely lubricated moving parts. Every year he had the plumber do the required maintenance, like cleaning the boiler tubes and servicing the blower and shaker mechanisms. Every few years he gave it a new coat of forest green paint. On very cold or windy winter nights, he would lightly doze next to the stoker in a folding, nylon web, lawn chair to ensure the fire did not go out, leaving us without heat or hot water in the morning. He wasn’t the type to show it, but I imagine he must have felt a sense of pride knowing that he kept his family warm with the Cadillac equivalent of modern coal heat.
In the early 1990s, several years after my grandparents passed, my father replaced our coal stoker with a much smaller, more efficient, no labor, natural gas furnace. In doing so we lost the secondary benefit of having that hulking block of metal radiate warmth into the basement. In the winter, my grandmother had hung laundry in the basement. My grandfather would put scraps of bread in an aluminum pie plate on top of the stoker to dry and then crush for breadcrumbs. My mother would hang our bulky wet clothes to dry after a day sledding and playing in the snow. During hunting season, we hung our wet clothes and boots next to the stoker to dry by early the next morning, our own version of the miners’ washhouse.
The heat that radiated from the stoker mass itself produced no smell unlike the signature smell of a wood fire or the telltale smell from the radiators when the heat came on. After a day outdoors, tired, wet, and chilled, we’d enter the basement and it wasn't just warm – it was coal warm, a penetrating but comfortable warmth. You welcomed it on your cold face and hands, and it surrounded you like blankets in a warm bed you don’t want to leave on a cold morning.
The stoker silently radiated warmth all the time. Since it supplied comfort heat in the colder months and hot water year-round it always had a fire in it. It warmed the concrete basement floor that my grandfather had poured over the earthen floor. It warmed the original wood kitchen cabinets that my grandfather re-purposed to create a second kitchen in the basement. It warmed the shelves of glass canning jars waiting to preserve tomatoes and peppers from our backyard garden. It warmed the white, deep set, porcelain enamel sink that received the discharge hose from the wringer washing machine. It warmed the metal pipe handrail on the basement steps, worn and polished from decades of use. The only thing it didn’t warm—and that was intentional—was the small corner room behind a door we called the wine cellar, where my immigrant grandfather made wine.
Retiring the old coal stoker signified more than just the need to extinguish its fire. It marked the end of my family’s century-long, daily dependence on anthracite that began in 1889, when my great-grandparents first settled in Lattimer No. 2 trading poverty for opportunity. To remove the hulking heater from the basement, the plumber needed to disassemble it. Although the stoker was cold, its fire was not completely out because sparked by a tinge of nostalgia, I asked my father to set aside for me the heavy cast iron, ash tub door. Like the emblem on a Cadillac’s grill, the door’s raised letters read "Losch Boiler Co. Summit Station PA.” I didn't know then what I was going to do with it, but 30 years later, I still have that door. It is now "parked" in my garage and is a comforting reminder that our old coal furnace continues to radiate warm memories.
Jim LaRegina is a retired geologist looking to rediscover the people, the events, and the memories that defined Pennsylvania's Coal Region. He can be reached at jlaregina13@gmail.com.
