14 STRANGE Appalachian Kitchen Features That Disappeared (I Rebuilt Four of Them)

I can still walk my mother's kitchen with my eyes shut, and I have not stood in that room since nineteen sixty one. Stove wall on the right. Window wall straight ahead. Door wall behind me, and under my feet a trap door with an iron ring in it. Fourteen things in that room did work that no kitchen of mine has ever done since. They are all gone now, every one of them. And four of them I put back, with my own hands, forty years later. On a Tuesday in June of nineteen sixty one, two men came up our road in a truck and took that kitchen apart in a day and a half. I was eight years old and I sat on the porch steps and watched them carry it out piece by piece. When they set the new white stove down on the kitchen floor, my mother went into the front room and cried. I thought she was crying because it was gone. She was crying because it was finally over. So this is not a video about how the old way was better. It is a walk through fourteen pieces of beautiful, clever work that fed eleven people on almost nothing, told honestly, by the son of the woman who did that work and wanted out of that room her entire married life. Here they are, wall by wall. The warming closet over the wood range, and the problem it solved that every working family still has. The reservoir on the side of the stove that kept water hot all day for nothing. The woodbox that went straight through the wall, so nobody carried an armload of bark and beetles through a clean kitchen. The ash drawer, and what it fed, because the ashes went into a hopper in the yard and came back as lye soap. The dry sink under the window. The window shelf. The ceiling, and the heat that rose and dried everything hung from it. The pie safe with the punched tin doors. The meal bin that held fifty pounds and brought the mice every fall. The food safe that stood with its legs in cans of water. The trap door in the floor, down to the cold cellar. The slop bucket by the door, and why there was no garbage in that house. And then out the kitchen door, the two that were not in the room at all: the summer kitchen, and the springhouse, which is still standing, with the roof gone and the spring still running through it every day for nobody. I will tell you where each piece went, because people ask. I will tell you which ones hurt her, because some of them did. And I will tell you what that white stove gave her back, which was an hour of her life every single day. She got that stove in June. By September she had read four books. Then I will tell you which four I rebuilt, why, and what they cost me, down to the hinges. Not because the old way was better. Because four of them solved a problem the new kitchen created, and the new kitchen never solved it back. The other ten I do not want, do not miss, and would not go back to. And there is a fifth one. I built it in nineteen ninety four, the best piece of furniture I have ever made, and in thirty one years it has never held one single pie. I will tell you what it holds instead. If you are going to keep something from a kitchen like that, do not keep it because your mother had one. Keep it because it does something your kitchen cannot do. Fourteen things. Four came home. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.