32 STRANGE Appalachian Home Features That Have Disappeared (Four Were Smarter Than Ours)

🔗 Keep $1,300 a Year in Your Pocket with My Complete Appalachian Pocket-Fix Method: https://burlsizemore.com The house I grew up in did not have one machine in it to make a room cooler, and it got hot in that hollow. Ninety five degrees in August and it would sit there for a week. There was no fan and there was no unit in a window, and the house handled it, because the house was built to handle it. Then somebody invented a box that blows cold air, and over about forty years we took out every single part of that house that used to do the same job, one at a time, and never wrote down what any of them were for. I am Burl Sizemore. I am seventy two years old and I have spent all of it on one ridge in eastern Kentucky. Here are thirty two of them. The gate at the road, hung so a grown person could work it with one hand and a child could not — a plow point on a chain over a pulley — and it was never about keeping a child in, it was about the road. The mounting block, a flat stone about two feet high set in the ground beside the road. The swept yard, bare dirt and no grass at all. The whitewash that went on the fruit trees, the bottom four feet of the smokehouse, the fence posts and the rocks along the walk every spring, and it was not paint and it was never trying to be. The porch. The porch roof, deliberately low and reaching out farther than it needed to, and the two go together. The wash bench outside the kitchen door with a basin, a bucket, a bar of soap in a dish and a towel on a nail — and the second thing it did was make a pause. The transom over the door, which vents a room with the door shut. The Dutch door, split across the middle so the top half opened and the bottom half stayed latched. The row of iron hooks beside the door, one for each person in the house, in order of age. The front door that swung outward onto the porch. The oak threshold worn into a shallow dish by eighty years of feet — nobody sanded it and nobody replaced it, because it was not damage. The front room, shut most of the year, cold as the outside in January, and that is where you laid out the dead. The corner cupboard built at an angle across the corner, floor to ceiling. The window opened at the top and the bottom, which turns the air with no fan. The hearth bench with a lid, and kindling under the lid. The mantel, which was not decoration — it was the file. The chimney in the middle of the house. The cast iron grate in the floor, two feet square, and that was the heat for upstairs, all of it. Ceilings near ten feet downstairs and six and a half under the roof. The stair with a turn, so you could not see the top from the bottom. The dogtrot, an open passage cut straight through the middle of the building, which squeezes the wind and speeds it up. The summer kitchen, a separate building that took the fire out of the house in July. The pass through cut in the wall at waist height, with a shelf in it and a little door on the kitchen side. The back stairs, narrow enough that a big man turned his shoulders. The step down into the kitchen, with no threshold at all going out. The outside cellar door, which sent my mother into the rain four hundred times a year. The rope bed, no springs and no slats, holes bored through the rails and a rope run back and forth. The sleeping porch, which gives up on cooling the house and puts you outside of it. The trundle bed on wooden wheels that lived under the big bed all day. The room under the eaves, four feet high at the wall, which was where a child could go. And the dinner bell on a post — on our place a piece of plow blade hung on a wire that you hit with a bolt — which was heard by everybody at once, and a telephone is heard by one person. Most of them went away for reasons that were good, and I say so as I go. But four of them were flat smarter than what we have got, they were all four the same idea, and not one of them has a motor or costs anything to run. I put the working end of all this in a manual — the Appalachian Pocket Fix Method, at burlsizemore.com. The video tells you what was in the house. The manual tells you how it was built and how to put a piece of it back, step by step, with the measurements. Now tell me what your house had. Every single time I do one of these I find out that somebody solved the same problem a better way than we did.