6 Tricks Old Logging Camps Used to Keep 80 Men Warm With One Stove. Without Them You Heat the Floor

January, 1936. Eighty men in a plank bunkhouse a hundred feet long on a bench above the Cranberry River, four thousand feet up, twenty-one below on the thermometer nailed to the cookhouse door. One stove, a steel drum in the middle of the floor. Not one man froze, all winter, and the reason was not the stove. My grandfather Enoch scaled logs for that camp from 1931 until it closed, and his tally book is open on the table in front of me to that January. Six things those men did, every one of them backwards from what a modern house teaches, every one of them working in a house tonight: where the stove stood and where the pipe went; why they heated the men and not the building; the rack above the stove that mattered more than the stove; the night man; more under you than over you; and the sixth, which is why that bunkhouse was kept at a temperature that would make you call the landlord, and why the camps that ran warm were the sick camps. Then the count in the book. Eighty-one names in January. Eighty-one in April. I slept in buildings like that one from 1969 until the last camp on this ridge closed in 1988. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters heating this house. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: the bunkhouse was eighty working men in wool, not a house with children and drywall. Do not run stovepipe horizontal in a house. Do not dry anything inside the clearance in your stove manual. If you tend a stove at night, there is a carbon monoxide detector within twenty feet of where you sleep, with a date on the back newer than ten years.