When modern Americans think of winter in a log cabin on the frontier, they tend to have a romantic picture of a family sitting warm and comfortably, enjoying a relaxing evening as the snow gently falls outside making a peaceful, rustic scene that creates dreams of living in a “more simple time.”
The reality was just the opposite, for cabins on the frontier were cold in winter, not warm and comfortable. Log walls served as a windbreak, not an insulator, and once one got more than five or so feet from the fireplace in a cabin, it was as cold inside as it was outside. The only mitigating factor of the logs was that the cold blast of the winter winds was not as freezing to the inhabitants of a log cabin.
Movies often will depict a fireplace as efficient heaters, but on the frontier, families huddled close to a fireplace not to keep warm by sitting in a rocking chair and telling stories, but most often trying to avoid freezing to death on exceptionally cold days and nights.
Fireplaces only heated a small percentage of the air space of a cabin, and thus when movies portray pioneers in the 1850s or other times on the frontier and everyone is walking around in a cabin wearing light clothing, that certainly gives the impression that fireplaces were great heaters in frontier cabins.
The reality is that they weren’t, and the pioneers bundled up in multiple layers of clothing when they went to bed at night and piled as many blankets on top of them as humanly possible to stay warm in cabins through cold winter nights on the frontier.
The pioneers’ first major purchase was normally an iron potbelly or other type of stove, for an iron stove was actually a more efficient heater for a cabin than a fireplace because the radiant heat from both the stove and the stove pipes made for a warmer airspace than a fireplace did.
Indeed, the Rev. Samuel Adair and his wife, Florella Brown Adair, sealed up their fireplace as soon as they purchased a stove that heated the Adair Cabin much more efficiently than their fireplace had in the past.
The cold cabins of the pioneers, and indeed the colder buildings in general in rural and in urban areas, were one of the reasons that both men and women wore multiple layers of clothing indoors and out during winter, and even in the fall.
The reason that both men and women wore hats more than in modern culture was the simple, practical reason that they kept their heads warm. Buildings did not have central heating, and rooms often had small, individual heating stoves in them, making wearing multiple layers necessary both day and night, indoors and out during late fall and winter on the frontier.
The pioneers who endured winters on the Kansas frontier certainly deserve our respect and admiration for enduring winters in conditions that would make modern Americans shiver in more ways than one.
Grady Atwater is site administrator of the John Brown Museum and State Historic Site.
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