Whispering Pines: Home and Hearth

In this month’s column, John Cross ’76 prepares for the chill of the winter to come by looking back at the challenges and hazards of staying warm at Bowdoin in the 19th century.

As I write this I am looking out on a cold, rainy, darkening November afternoon. The air carries traces of wood smoke and a chill that is a harbinger of winter, students and faculty alike are poised at the top of the steep downhill run to the end of the semester, and memories of holiday seasons past crowd into our conscious thoughts. It is the season when flames dancing in fireplaces or stoves offer warmth that is measured as much by the emotional comfort it provides as by BTUs or by degrees of ambient temperature.

Prior to the 1890s, Bowdoin dormitories lacked electricity, running water and central heating. Illumination by candles and oil lamps gave way to gas lights and kerosene lamps by mid-century. Barrels of water at the ends of the dormitories and the College privy, located a short walk from the dormitories, had to suffice. Rooms were heated with wood or coal, initially in open fireplaces and later in cast iron parlor stoves, and term bills of the 19th century included a charge for wood or coal fuel.

Stacked fireplaces revealed by the 1964 interior renovations in Winthrop Hall.

For students accustomed to cutting, hauling, stacking and burning wood, and to tending fires every day, waking up in a room cold enough for ice to have formed in the wash basin would not have been out of the ordinary. To the list of potential fire hazards from heating and lighting a room, one could add smoking materials and these two items from “Bowdoin Traditions and Customs” in the 1919 Bugle:

Paper Stringing – It used to be the custom to fix papers on strings running from the upper to the lower halls of the dormitories and set fire to them.
Bonfires in the Dormitories – It was the custom not long ago for dormitory students to celebrate athletic victories by building fires in the halls of the dormitories.

Winthrop, Maine and Appleton Halls were each divided into two ends by double walls of brick designed to limit the spread of fire. On March 4, 1822, a fire began in the attic of Maine Hall while most of the students were in classes. The building was gutted, forcing students, including Nathaniel Hawthorne [1825], to seek shelter in the homes of professors and elsewhere in town for the remainder of the year. The burden of rebuilding was made all the more difficult because the building had not been insured. Appeals for donations went out to prominent citizens in Maine, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., and contributions came in from President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun and others to enable a new Maine Hall to rise from the ashes.

The hearth in Massachusetts Hall from which the College began, in a 1953 photo by Kosti Ruohomaa.

The rebuilt (and insured) Maine Hall burned a second time on February 17, 1836. The blaze started in a room on the northeast corner of Maine Hall at 2 a.m. and spread quickly. According to the eyewitness account of Edward Daveis of the Class of 1838, “One of the students in the fourth story was the first to smell the smoke, he jumped up and without stopping to attempt to save anything ran down stairs breaking open all the students’ doors as he passed them. All of the students in that end lost everything but the clothes they wore, most of them leaving their outside garments and watches even.”

The most dramatic rescue was of an envelope containing $100 from a fourth floor room in the north end. Finding the north stairway engulfed in flame, Samuel Silsbee climbed to the south stair, went out a fourth floor window and climbed into his friend’s burning room on the north side of the fire wall, and returned with the envelope. The wall did its job, however, allowing the occupants of South Maine ample time to move their belongings out of the dormitory before the flames eventually spread to the south end along the roof line. Remarkably, there was no loss of life. The 3,000-volume Athenian Society Library in North Maine was lost to the fire, with the exception of books out on loan; the Peucinian Society Library, in the south end, was rescued, except for books on loan to occupants of North Maine.

The chimneys that are such prominent features of the architecture of Winthrop, Maine, Appleton and Hyde no longer connect to working fireplaces in student rooms. With the advent of central heating the fireplace openings were blocked. Extensive renovations to Winthrop, Maine and Appleton in the mid-1960s exposed the “bones” of the old heating system briefly – four stories of stacked fireplaces, eight to a floor. There are still a few fireplaces on campus – in the Moulton Union, in Daggett Lounge, in the Cram Alumni House, at the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center, and in several of the college houses (i.e., former fraternity chapter houses).

My favorite is still the 1802 kitchen fireplace in the McKeen Study in Massachusetts Hall, complete with a crane, andirons, cast-iron pots and kettles, and a brick oven with an iron door. The fireplace was the kitchen hearth of the McKeen family and the early College, although the pots and kettles are themselves early scientific apparatus, given to Professor Parker Cleaveland by the noted British chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Although it is no longer the site of a crackling blaze or glowing embers, the fireplace, captured for posterity by Finnish-American photographer Kosti Ruohomaa, remains for me a most warm and welcoming hearth.

With best wishes.

John R. Cross ’76
Secretary of Development and College Relations