Connections: Family Relics

I ’ve been all a-twitter as the dismantling of the early-19th-century Hedges barn on our property — soon to be moved and reconstructed across Main Street, on the Mulford Farm — draws near. I’ve also been deeply appreciative of E.J. Edwards, my children’s great-grandfather, who saved the barn and moved it up Edwards Lane. Today, his descendants all agree that it is right and proper that the East Hampton Historical Society has acquired it for public use.

As we work on emptying the barn of two centuries of stuff, I’ve had a remarkable feeling of stepping back in time each time I enter it. Livestock hasn’t lived in the stalls for at least 70 years; it’s been even longer since grain was sent down the chute. But walking in the other day I could just about smell cows, horses, and hay.

 As habitual readers of this column might remember, I spent most of my childhood summers on my grandparents’ farm in the Catskills, where there was a three-story barn, a relic of its past as a dairy farm — although we kept only one cow in these roomy accommodations, and only briefly. You might find it amusing that my olfactory nostalgia centers on the smell of manure, but my memory of that smell is complex and entirely pleasant.

Four generations of family and friends have stored hand-me-down furniture, sports gear, toys, and household doodads in our Edwards Lane barn, not to mention bikes, fence posts, parade floats, air-conditioners, basinets, printing-press parts, grinding stones, antique post office boxes, sailboards, 80-year-old Flexible Fliers, girlie magazines dating to the 1940s, scythes, ice boats, storm windows, porcelain sinks, and, at one point, my late mother-in-law’s sporty hardtop. Trying to figure out what it all was and who it belonged to, or who might want to make use of it now, was no small task.

Recently, as the emptying enters its final phase, we’ve brought out a wonderful, ancient horse-drawn sleigh, some big old wooden barrels, and what a knowledgeable woodworker told me was a “chair vise.” Sure enough, checking out chair vises on Google, I learned they also are known as shaping horses and were common devices for making chairs and other furniture by hand. Any idea that the vise we found was a valuable antique, however, was dispelled when I told my son David about this 19th-century treasure we had unearthed. . . . And he replied, “Sure it’s a chair vise. I made it.” (I should have known. When he was a college freshman, he made chairs, and we have a few nice ones to prove it.)

The most challenging object still in the barn, though, is Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s huge kitchen stove. What to do with it? It turns out that the stove was made by the Kalamazoo Company in Kalamazoo, Mich., and was marketed as “A Kalamazoo Direct to You.” That’s right, the company, in the first half of the 20th century, shipped its steel-andiron cooking stoves directly to customers and offered a 30-day guarantee.

Ours, which probably dates to the 1920s, is covered in cream and ochre porcelain enamel, with a firebox on one side for coal and wood, and the slogan “direct to you” right there on the thermometer built into the oven door. My late mother-in-law — true to form in our family, reluctant to give up old ways and old things — cooked on this coal-andwood stove until her death in 1974. We removed it and stored it in the barn when we inherited the house and updated to a six-burner propane stove (which, by now a family relic itself, is still in use in the kitchen). The Kalamazoo behemoth has been kept under cover, with all its parts intact, I believe — including stovepipe — but the notion that someone in the family would want to actually use it someday seems a fantasy.

It’s available now at a wonderful discount. Would any of you like it?

I mean, it’s not like we can belatedly take the Kalamazoo Company up on its return guarantee: It went out of business in 1952.