Many of our local colonial homes had a fireplace in the cellar and the main kitchen was there in the cellar. Our farmhouse had a brick fireplace in the cellar and alongside it was a brick Dutch bake oven. Over the years, my father fixed it up and put down a new brick hearth and a brick floor, while my mother collected redware pots and dishes and some pewter; and together they brought home antique cast iron trivets and fireplace chains and hooks that held pots from the crane over the fire. The fireplace was never used. I remember seeing my mother sitting on the edge of a small child’s bench she had down there, looking around at her perfect trove of unblemished period antiques, resting in her reconstituted colonial kitchen room smoking a Camel before she moved on to the next thing. My parents did not sit long. It was like a museum, and with my father’s death the collection was disbursed, and the room returned to cobwebs. But it lives here on this page and in my memory.

All colonial houses had stone cellars to get the first floor up out of the ground, whether, above it, the house was brick, stone, or wood framed. Fieldstone was the building material of choice because it was the only material, at the time, that would stand up to our Northeast winters and not be damaged by sub-zero temps. And might I point out, 300-million-year-old stone is not likely to rot? The cut (dressed or faced) fieldstone was of various stone types and textures, but mostly it was bluestone, as bluestones were the dominate glacial drop in our area.
If a house did not have a fireplace in the cellar, you could surely find a set of stone buttresses jutting from an end wall, and over these buttresses, between them, a stone archway shows just below the cellar ceiling. Some houses had a central chimney, and the stone support was in the middle of the cellar – like you find in the Walden House, maintained and displayed so well by the Walden Historical Society. Many novice observers entering a colonial cellar mistake this arch for a fireplace itself, but it is not, and has no exit, and the arch served the purpose of carrying the weight of the fireplace(s), hearth(s) and chimney built above it on the upper floors. One chimney could service numerous fireplaces, as the flue for each fireplace peeled off, or rather into, the chimney as the chimney moved up through the house. Bedrooms had fireplaces too, you know – just think of the Romance! “Benjamin, where’s that log you were going to bring up? Oh!”

So far, all the work on the Van Kleeck house has been in the concentrated effort to get back to square one – the first floor. The block work and the rebar and the heavily built central column were all built to allow us to pour a slab on top of this work. We cut a piece of heavy plywood to form a floor for our concrete pour, leaving most of the block wall tops open for direct contact between the block and the new hand mixed concrete to come. The plywood hangs on the block walls by about an inch or so and loses any functionality once the concrete sets. (I know you are asking.)

The slab is about 8 inches thick, and we worked in some nice aggregate stone I set aside in buckets. Brian finally got my derelict monster-willed mortar mixer running, with the steady Honda motor, and we used it near the end of the day to mix the last of the nine batches of mortar, and after mixing in the crushed stone – to turn mortar into concrete, like alchemy – we dumped it all, one wheelbarrow at a time, into our form.

My mix was straight Portland, nothing fancy, and after we left, Brian was going to give it a broom finish to help it bond with what we are about to build on top of it.

All that work and now we are ready to start the job.
Just how it goes.

Next we will focus on the building stone, as this project is a stone Rumford fireplace. We will cut pieces of stone to fit our design and will be laying things out and snapping lines on the pour and viewing into the nonexistent structure.

Our cold-air intake and opening for the ash pit are already built into the base of the chimney, coming through our slab, and we are set now, back at ground zero, to start the real work, the fun part. Stay tuned. (It might be a while. I’m old!)