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Recalling Our Homes of 1910-1923

    My grandfather, Emil Petersen, always kept a Domestic or a young girl that 'lived-in' with the family. She had her own room upstairs. Mornings she assisted with making the beds in the upstairs bedrooms, and would often remain in her room to read, etc. If she were wanted downstairs (or at any other time she was upstairs) there was a regular door knob on its square shaft, mounted behind the door in the living room going to the dining room, which when pulled out about 4 or 5 inches, would ring a small bell in the maid's room.

     This was made possible by a thin wire going over a pulley behind the square shaft where it was attached to the shaft, and running in the wall to upstairs where it emerged and was attached to a spiral springwire, on which the small, high pitched bell was mounted. One or two good pulls on the knob down stairs made the bell move back and forth on its spiral spring mounting, causing it to ring.

     When we lived in the August Petersen home across the street from my grandfather's (where the Fred Stuhrs later built their home at 503 McKinley Ave.) they also had one of these bells, but due to the layout of that house, the knob to activate the bell was in the Master bedroom downstairs, with the bell knob being in the 'Trunk Room' adjacent to the Maid's Room. In this way, the bell was somewhat isolated from other upstairs bedrooms and its ringing would hardly be heard by others in their rooms.

     In the large barn at my grandfather's home, in the back part, a 'room' was built inside the barn with its walls about a foot or so from the outside walls of the barn itself. These walls were a full story high, going up to the second floor of the barn. The space between the two walls was filled with sawdust all the way from the bottom to the top. The floor in this room also had about a foot or so of sawdust on it. So, it was like a box inside of a larger box and insulated with sawdust. This inner 'room' was the Ice House, where in winter it was filled with large cubes of ice, about a foot square and maybe 15 inches or so long. They were sawed out of river ice over at Massillon on the Wapsi . (We still have the big ice saw.) After a layer of cubes was laid in the 'room' it was covered with a layer of sawdust to keep the layers from sticking to each other, and then another layer of cubes was laid, until full. In summer or when warmer weather indicated the 'Ice Box' to be placed into service., the cubes of ice were brought down from the Ice House, rinsed of sawdust under the pump at the well, and set into the ice hold of the Ice Box.

     To keep the ice box cool, a separate room was built onto the north side of the house, even with a double door, to insure heat transfer being at a minimum when the door to the Refrigerator Room was opened. The room of the house next to the 'North Room' was the Laundry and on wash days the range in the room was used for heating water. This stove was for that purpose only, and cooking was done in the kitchen on its separate range.

     In the early days of Gas in Lowden, much cooking was done on a Clark gas range, which had the oven above the burners, which was very convenient. That way the kitchen kept cool, even on wash days.

     My two brothers had a “Wireless” Receiver in 1918, which brought in wire- . . .

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. . . less telegraph signals on long-wave. There was no voice or music then, and the dots and dashes came in as a high-pitched tone. The boys also had some kind of sending apparatus, but it was of low power and did not go out very far. But the sparks sure flew when they used it for sending our their messages.

     My brother Emil, here in Lowden, with whom I and our sister Olga lives, tells me about the wireless receiving set he built. It had some of the first vacuum tubes ever made, which looked like a hot dog or cigar in shape and about that length and roundness. To run it, he used two big No. 6 dry cells with 2 screw and nut terminals on top. To furnish getting enough electricity for the one element in the tube called the plate, to operate, we would buy 30 flashlight batteries at the dime store in Cedar Rapids and would solder wire from one to the other and then to the tube. This tube did not have a base with pins on it like radio tubes had later, but had wires coming out of each end. These were put into the holds of the 'binding posts' and these upper wires supported the tube against the front panel, made of a cardboard material about ¼ in. thick. The wires coming out of the bottom also were connected to binding posts. There were big coils the size of big round oatmeal boxes and small coils slid into them on brass rods or rails, so as to hold them in the same relationship to each other. It was a large size receiving set.

     Going back to the August Petersen home for a minute, I remember a good size closet between the kitchen and the dining room, which had a door in each room. This way the dishes from a meal, when washed and dried in the kitchen were put into the closet, and when it was time to 'set the table' the door to this closet in the dining room was opened and the dishes were taken out to put on the table. This way one did not have to carry an armload or two of dishes when it was time to put them on the table, by having to go out into the kitchen to get them. I have never seen this in any other home, but it was a real convenience.

     On each side of McKinley Avenue, in front of both the August Petersen home and Emil Petersen's (my grandfather) there were large poplar trees planted in the parkway. Early pictures taken in the '90s showed them to be medium in size, but later they were huge. Their branches intertwined across the street, making sort of a Gothic arch. When it rained hard, water got through onto the dirt street, and sunshine did not penetrate well through those many branches onto the shaded street, with the result that it was sort of muddy quite awhile.

     Since there were frequent trips between these two houses, we had our own 'private' bridge going from one side of McKinley to the other. The 'bridge' part was to let water pass under this walk, as it crossed the drainage ditch at each side of the street. Later on, when the sewers were laid in 1955 or so, the structure was removed, as the level of the street was then raised.

     Each house had very high ceilings, being 11 and 12 feet high. Before I was born, the rooms were heated by coal stoves, but larger than the usual isinglass, nickle-plated base burners. In 1906 and '07, the basements were enlarged and a steam heating plant with radiators was installed into both homes. The radiators were placed under the windows in each room, and when cool or cold air leaked into the rooms at this point, it was immediately heated, making for greater comfort and convenience, and eliminating the annoying cold . . .

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. . . drafts in the rooms. Soft coal was now burned, some times a load of coal would make a lot of soot that had to be brushed out of the inside of the furnace before too much would accumulate, get loose and fly out of the chimney as sparks, easily seen at night.

     We had gas street lights in Lowden up to about 1914 or '15 and every night the Marshal would light the mantels in the lamps.

              Mrs Maria (Andresen) Johnston