|
 Built
in 1990, this five foot wide cooking fireplace and bread oven is a
pretty good reproduction of a Williamsburg-style working fireplace,
circa 1760.
Fireplaces similar to this one were common in summer
kitchens all over the East and Midwest up through about 1850. They often
coexisted with Rumford fireplaces in the main house. The Rumfords were
for heat, of course, but you didn't necessarily want the fireplace you
cooked on to heat your house. Not in the summer, anyway.
These days when we build an early American cooking fireplace, the
location usually is the "great room," not the summer kitchen. And
usually the owners of the house are doing the cooking -- not the
servants. So we make some compromises.
Indeed, this fireplace is a Rumford fireplace and has an efficient,
rounded throat and smaller flue than its 1760 ancestor. The design makes
it more efficient that its predessor.
As you look at the picture, take note of the red brick firebox. It's
regular solid facebrick (no cores) laid in regular Portland cement
mortar. In 1760, the Colonists didn't have firebrick -- and my customer
for this fireplace didn't like that "ugly yellow firebrick."
I told him facebrick couldn't take the thermal shock and would crack
and spall. But I couldn't change his mind.
A year after I built the fireplace, my customer called to tell me how
much he enjoyed the fireplace and oven. He said five of the bricks in
the fireback had cracked and the face had spalled off another one.
You might think this would mean I needed to return for repairs. Not
so. "It's great", he said. "The fireplace is only a year old and it
already looks as if it's 200 years old." |
