Grandmother's House, Part 1

Diagram of first floor, drawn from memory

I’ve written some before about how my grandmother’s house was designed by my uncle Carl. And how it was built on some lots that my grandfather had bought. The lots had some corn storage facilities on them. The corn could be hauled in from the farm at a convenient time (as in the winter when the ground was frozen so that the ungraveled roads were passable). The corn would thus be available for sale when the price was right. The fact that these lots were available and had been used for corn storage is I think [representative] of the business acumen of my grandfather. An acumen that was largely lacking in all of his sons. My uncle Carl was an entrepreneur of a sort with his threshing and corn shelling operations but I suspect that the investment would have been better made in Iowa farmland.

I shall now turn to a discussion of my grandmother’s house. The house was basically a rectangle in floor plan, indeed almost a square. There was a full basement, first and second stories and a full attic. The latter had restricted headroom at the eaves. In front of the house was the front porch, extending the full width of the house and perhaps 8 to 10 feet deep.

In the summertime screens were put up to keep the flies out. During the summer there were always two rockers or chairs out on the porch, painted sort of a light aqua-green color. One of these, to the left of the front door (which was in the center of the porch, looking directly at the house from the front), was typically the chair used by my uncle Carl whenever he was on the porch. It was here I can recall seeing him reading the newspaper or the Wallace’s Farmer, his lips silently forming each word, not a single one being missed. I also remember him sitting in his chair morosely viewing the assembled people who had gathered at the house for refreshments and visiting after the funerals of uncle George and aunt Ruth.

Beneath the acerbic and non-social exterior of my uncle Carl there was a sentimental nature that was affected by evidences of the transitory nature of life. Typically after a funeral there would be a later afternoon period of active visiting as relatives would be seeing each other for the first time after a considerable period had elapsed (say since the last funeral in the family). Uncle Carl would not participate in this visiting, nursing instead his private sense of grief and loss.

The house at the time it was constructed was up-to-date as to the household conveniences available at the time, but few if any changes were made over the years to update it, until my mother took over the house when uncle Carl and aunt Esther moved to Madrid. About the only change that I can recall was the addition of a refrigerator perhaps in the 1940s sometime. The refrigerator was acquired through some sort of arrangement by relatives of uncle Verner, perhaps a special purchase price etc. I recall there was some difficulty with the initial operation of the unit and uncle Carl, acerbic as always was disposed to making an issue of the difficulty. Aunt Laurine who was on the scene tried to soft-pedal any evidence of dissension, doubtless for keeping family feelings amiable. I don’t know how the situation was finally resolved.

The heating system in the house was hot-water (natural convection) with radiators in most rooms except the kitchen and the upstairs sleeping porch. As I recall the upstairs hall was also unheated and was characteristically cool in the wintertime (the doors to the bedrooms being carefully closed as a rule). I suppose the furnace was stoked with coal in part, but when uncle Carl was feeding it (at least in later years) he used corncobs as the sole source of fuel. This involved fairly frequent trips to the furnace as corncobs, though they burn quite hot, are consumed rather rapidly. For overnight periods he developed a stoking technique that involved banking a large pile of cobs at one side of the firebox, through which the fire burned more slowly. After my mother moved into the house, the furnace was replaced with gas heat, doubtless on some sort of automatic control. I think she also replaced the old kitchen range with a gas stove but of that I am not certain.

Though the house was connected to the municipal water system at least in later years, it may not have been when first constructed. The house had a cistern for collecting rainwater and this was used for such purposed as laundry and baths. There was a well on the back porch and this supplied I suppose water for cooking and drinking. Unlike the little brown house which has a pressure tank for providing the flow of soft rainwater, grandmother’s house had gravity flow, the head being provided by a holding tank up in the attic. How this was charged from the cistern I don’t know.

In later years the little brown house had used city water for all purposes with a water softener to make the water suitable for laundry, etc. My mother, on the move back to town from the farm, acquired a Maytag washing machine to take the place of the old wooden-tub washer of pre-farm days and the Hart-Parr machine out on the farm. I suspect that my grandmother and aunt Esther continued to use their outdated wood tub washer until aunt Esther stopped doing laundry altogether.

Hot water in pre-farm days at the little brown house, on the farm and at my grandmother’s was provided by a unit in the kitchen range. I suppose in later years it was provided by a gas-heated hot water heater, at least after the folks moved back to the little brown house and after my mother occupied by grandmother’s house.