Harsh winters and immigrant survival in the New World
Like the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Plantation era, American immigrant survival was not always about having enough food, but dependent on surviving the terrible North American blizzards and cold in a new land until spring weather had turned a corner and the harsh forbidding winter was gone. According to Dr. Bertolet’s early interviews with 18th Century pioneer immigrants in the Oley Valley, the preoccupation of the PA Dutch pioneers was to seek a comfortable warm abode until the harsh, sometimes unexpected, North American winters had turned into a welcoming spring season.
Several “Great Snows” were recorded around the 1740s, according to these Oley Valley natives that were interviewed attesting to four feet deep snow, and only a few deer had survived in the Oley Hills where they could only consume vegetation on the windswept summits. Subsequently, modern historians can read with amazement at how in- genious frontiersmen were, seeking clever Colonial inventions, that allowed them to survive the North American winters. Copper bed warmers or heated hearth bricks or stones were used to warm their bedsteads beneath feather tick covers.
However, no other ethnic group prided ethnic ingenuity more than the PA Dutch, who in the 18th Century, devised a three-room architectural floor plan design that encompassed placing their fireplaces in the middle of a log cabin or stone abode to take advantage of central heating. This allowed them to incorporate their German cast iron five-plate stoves in a heated room they called the “Stube room” or Great room adjacent to the German hearth fireplace. Previous to the invention of the Franklin stove (1741), these early German five-plate iron stoves used to heat the homes of the PA Dutch were considered a novelty in later decades.
Not until the last 20 to 30 years, though, have antiquarians discovered the large quantity of German iron plate stoves that have survived in the antique market, many of which were cast with Biblical scenes that adorned the Stube rooms where pioneers huddled to warm themselves in an effort to survive North American winters. Although the Daniel Boone Homestead is an excellent example of one of these pioneer log houses with a central hearth fireplace and Stube room, perhaps the nation’s best example of a Germanic central fireplace structure is the 1755 Wilhelm Pott Manor house at Lobachsville with its built-in rare fireplace warming seat.
Near to the Pott Manor house and open to the public once or twice a year, the Jacob Keim Central Fireplace measures 102 inches from left jamb to right, inside the masonry jambs. However, if one includes both jambs, it measures 142.5 inches from one end of the mantel to the other end, in comparison, a quite sizable structure as is Pott fireplace with similar dimensions. Unlike their small gable-end English fireplace counterparts, these large PA Dutch cen--