I adore old appliances & the antique toaster may be at the top of my list. I come by it honestly, being the granddaughter of a West Virginia baker. My grandfather decided to enter the business because he figured that it would be economically stable. People would always eat bread. It was a correct decision that benefited our family for several generations.
When I was a child growing up in Arizona, there was bread on the table every meal, never bought off the shelf, always purchased from the family bakery that had a stand at our neighborhood grocery.
Then I went to school & discovered Wonder Bread, served in our cafeteria. I was astonished & confused. You could squish it up in a ball like Play-Doh! I was accustomed to bread with body. You had to work a little to eat it.
My mother was appalled at this version of bread. In no way did she consider it the best nor even think of it as real bread.
The specialty of my family’s bakery was salt rising bread. An Appalachian invention, I cannot but wonder if the recipe made its way from Sara Emmeline, my great-grandmother on the farm, to my grandmother, Gordie Elsie who left the farm as a young girl to become a woman of culture, to the bakery of her new husband. My cousin, whose father took over the bakery from my grandfather & who worked there for many years tells me that, “It was not a big seller unfortunately. Most of it was sold in the outlying small towns, mainly mining communities or communities with lots of old timers that come out of the West Virginia hollows on a Saturday morning to do their shopping in towns like Grant Town, or Fairview or Hundred. Fine folks with discerning tastes.”
Not to be found in Arizona, my mother dreamed of salt rising & was sent loaves of it by the family. This humble bread, born of poverty & necessity, became a luxury for my mother because of its scarcity. Yeastless, it was very dense & chewy, like the most well-known sourdough & like its San Francisco counterpart, made exquisite, crunchy toast. We argued over who would get the heels.
LET’S BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TALE OF THE ANTIQUE TOASTER
And jump around. I try to write chronologically, but cultural history is not always chronological. Different locations & classes changed their practices at differing times. I hope that you can follow along as I move from 1950 to 2000 B.C. to 1850 to 1910, then back to 1905, in my attempt to tell the tale of the antique toaster.
So here goes….
We have been eating grains since we were hunter/gathers. We learned to cook them, making gruel, which was easier to digest than the raw seeds, but rather messy. Then we discovered that baking grains into bread was a great deal handier. It grew mold more slowly. You could tote it around & it was tidy. You could eat it with your hands.
Bread is mostly sugars & starches making it the perfect candidate for caramelizing. Our affinity for crunch is hardwired into our species, as is our love of fat, so it’s not surprising that avocado toast is the food darling of the decade.
So, the obvious next next step was toasting the bread which made it even easier to digest. You could melt stuff on it. It was warm & comforting & it packed a nice caramelized crunch.
THE TOASTER AS PART OF OUR CHANGING CULTURE
When we’re talking about bungalow toasters (That’s kinda what we do here, you know. We talk about bungalows.) we’re talking about pre-electricity for most of the original homeowners.
The earliest toasters, from the 1800’s, were forks made of iron with long handles so that you could stand back from the flames of the open fire. By the 1850’s, they began making the holders in a lighter metal & featured a mesh grill so that you could see the bread browning as it toasted.
With the decline of domestic help, as woman left working as maids to labor in the factories, appliances designed to ease the workload of the lady of the house became a necessity. Fortunately, the domestic technology was developing that could support this cultural change. For a more in-depth understanding of this glimpse into LIFE & TIMES, read this article.
In 1905, the first filament, Nichrome, a non-magnetic alloy of nickel & chromium was discovered that could repeatedly generate heat to toast bread.
G.E. patented the first electric toaster, the D-12, for use in the home in 1909. It has four heating elements with the wire wrapped around forms made of heat-resistant mica. It sat on a porcelain base to insulate the table under it. As an option, you could get the base with a floral design. The toast was held in place by an exposed wire frame. Of course, it toasted only one side of the bread, giving you ample opportunity to burn your fingers!
However, electricity was not common in homes until the 1920’s. By 1925, only half the homes in America had electrical power & these were in larger metropolitan communities. It wasn’t until 1936, with FDR’s Rural Electrification Act, that millions of Americans, living outside of cities had access to electricity.
(Let’s do the Time Warp Again!) However, the Hare House, which was built in 1910, was lit by gas & most likely had a wood burning stove so Grace did not use the D-12 to make Alfred’s toast. One option was to use a cast iron skillet. She might have also used a tin contraption that sat on her wood burning stove. This flimsy piece of vented metal held the pieces of bread that you cut from the loaf & offered your fingers no protection against its heat. Tin rusts very easily when exposed to moisture so I can’t imagine that these lasted very long. I had one in my collection for my dreamed of restoration of the Hare House kitchen. I considered trying it out but it was too awful!
In 1913, the Coleman Electric Stove Company made a toaster that automatically turned the bread, saving fingers.
In 1914, Lloyd & Hazel Copeman, of the Copeman Electric Stove Company, were issued five patents for ways to “turn the toast” in their “automatic” toasters.
In 1919, the year that my mother was born, Charles Strite, a Minnesota mechanic invented the pop-up toaster, the Toastmaster, with both springs & a timer, for restaurant use. He later improved his design & sold it to the general public. You could even twist a little peg to set the toaster for the degree of toasting! Check out my toast videos to hear the timer loudly clicking away at differing speeds, depending on how dark you wanted your toast to be.
Around this time, manufacturers began adding a case to the units as a safety feature. With this newfangled toaster, Mom no longer had to be asphyxiated in the kitchen by smoke from burning toast, when she was preparing supper for the family.
A commonly voiced cliché in our baker family was, “The best thing since sliced bread!” In 1928, a bread slicing machine was invented & by 1930, The Continental Baking Company, which made that bread that fascinated me so as a child, Wonder Bread, began selling sliced bread which greatly increased the popularity of toasters. At the same time, assembly line production & easy credit made it possible for ordinary Americans to purchase many of these new consumer goods. A toaster on every table!
WON’T YOU BE MY SWEETHEART OF AN ANTIQUE TOASTER
A favorite toaster has been dubbed the “Sweetheart” because of its heart shape face, pendant “earrings” & its delicate, ornate casing. This Landers Frary & Clark toaster (Universal Model E9410, patented in 1929) was designed to attract the American housewife & was promoted as being an appealing addition to her kitchen decor. One of my readers remembers it fondly from his grandmother’s house, where, no, the children were allowed to watch, but not allowed to touch it.
Rather than march all the various styles of toasters across the page, I think I’d rather invite you to my Pinterest page where you can just gorge on pictures of them & also other small appliances. As one of my readers commented, “This is where the good stuff is!”
To see a variety of antique toasters in action, visit my YouTube playlist, ANTIQUE TOASTERS.
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I have never acquired an old house that had its original wood window screens. Makes sense. They are rather flimsy items that have maximum exposure to the elements & over the decades, windows fail & the harnessing of electricity has made it possible to use HVAC systems to cool our houses. Opening windows has fallen out of favor as people have come to believe that a house should be all buttoned up & air tight. And with the abandonment of fresh air has come the abandonment of wood window number tacks.
Being the daughter of a gardener, I like to bring the outdoors in so I like to restore my windows & build new wood screens. My little fur friends enjoy sniffing the great outdoors & I kinda live to make them happy.
The tricky part of making these screens is that old houses are seriously out of plumb & the windows vary in size, perhaps only gently, but enough to make it impossible to install a screen to a random window. Each screen must be custom made (measuring twice!) & then it belongs to that window.
I have a sensitive sniffer so I like to have clean screens & the best way to clean them is by removing them & then spraying them with a hose. Of course it’s easiest to pull them all off a side at one time, line them up & squirt them, but how do you keep them sorted? And right-side-up?
For you folks who live in regions that require you to use storm windows, necessitating a bi-yearly swap, this little trick will save you a great deal of time & aggravation.
USE WINDOW NUMBER TACKS
Invented in 1948, these cute & handy little items were used to mark windows with their matching storm windows in winter or their screens in summer. They are little, very sharp tacks made of a metal alloy with numbers stamped on their heads. The stamping is heavy enough that you can paint & disappear them, but remain legible. A tiny barb under the head ensures that they will stay in place.
They are produced in sets that are numbered from 1-25 & second sets if you have more windows (Most bungalows do!) that is numbered from 26- 50. You purchase a set for the windows & a corresponding set for the screens & another for your storm windows, should you have them.
You can occasionally find vintage ones on eBay or Etsy & can purchase new ones from House of Antique Hardware
TIP: I love old windows & doors, so if you’d like to know more about them, click here.
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Our bungalows are products of old technology. All the wood in our framing, our siding, our shingles, treasured built-ins, a main feature of the character of our homes, our wainscoting was milled by machines, likely powered by steam or coal or sweat. The oldest electric mill that I can find in my research, was in Elk River, Idaho, back in 1912.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Arts & Crafts Movement of the 19th Century was born as a reaction to the more mechanized world of the Industrial Revolution. This revolution increased production capacity by 1,000 fold in every industry. Instead of the artisan’s handcrafting of a beautiful chair, a factory churned out hundreds of chairs & fitted them with fancy gee-gaws. This had a major impact on people’s daily lives. Instead of working in a craft studio, or on the family farm, people swarmed to the cities where they went to work in a factory tending huge, whirring machines & earned the where-with-all to purchase these items- at least some of them did. Thanks to Charles Dickens we know that many remained ill-fed, unhoused & impoverished, orphaned & barefoot while some thrived, amassing great fortunes.
The grandfather of the Arts & Crafts Movement, John Ruskin had much to say on the matter. His statement, “Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness,” eloquently summarized the philosophy of the Movement.
(Looking at these images of children slaving to help feed their families makes me very weary. Oh, yeah. If they had families)
THE ENERGY THAT SUPPORTED CONSTRUCTION PRIOR TO ELECTRICITY
The key driver of the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of energy. With this ability to control power, our old growth forests could be razed & milled. The logs could be turned into lumber for homes, furniture & indeed, into the factory buildings that held the mills, some of these being thousands of square feet in size.
However, even prior to the coal powered steam engine was the invention of the line shaft which allowed many machines to be operated from one energy source, be it steam, water, wind or even animal.
AN OSHA NIGHTMARE
A line shaft is a power-driven rotating shaft for power transmission that distributed power from a large central power source to individual pieces of machinery throughout a workshop or an industrial complex. The central power source could be a water wheel, windmill, animal power or a steam engine. Originally, most had probably been powered by steam but in later years they were powered by a huge electric motor. In many cases, the individual machines were still set up for and connected to the line shaft system, so rather than replacing the machines, they just updated the power supplier.
These machines were an OSHA nightmare. Loud and dangerous with no safety features, they exemplified Industrial Age technology during which time thousands of people left their farms & surged into cities to work in the factories & loose fingers, limbs & lives to these behemoths.
These machines factored largely in the building of our bungalows. I do not believe that construction prior to electricity would have existed on any scale without the use of line shaft.
LINE SHAFT CONSTRUCTION
Here’s how it was constructed:
On the floor, or on the ceiling, was the power source, attached to the main shaft which it propelled by a belt attached to a pulley.
Hanging from the wood ceiling beams was the counter (or intermediate) shaft , a long, thick heavy, (often hundreds of pounds) metal rod. This shaft was attached to the high ceiling beams by heavy metal hangers.
Attached to this counter shaft were round metal pulleys, ranging in size from around 6″ in diameter to 36.” Long belts made of leather or fabric (usually leather) ran across these pulleys, to pulleys on the individual machines giving each individual machine its power. This was all suspended over a great expanse, as high as 15 feet it the air.
There were no safety features, nor procedures. The belts, spinning rapidly, could pull a worker by a limb, by a garment or by the hair into the machine, spinning him round & round before throwing him into the air & into yet another belt, a machine, or onto the hard concrete floor.
THE LINE SHAFT & YOUR BUNGALOW
When you next admire the beautiful features of your house, consider the part that line shafts & the hard-working people who operated them played. Observe a moment of silence in honor of those who toiled for so little in this cacophony, losing limbs & lives to mill the materials that make your house so beautiful.
When I see an old house being destroyed, I am saddened by the lost of beauty, but my heart breaks for those who toiled to create them, logging in the harsh conditions of the forest, or risking their lives to build our houses.
This is why I urge you all to take a stand for our built heritage. It’s more than just the houses.
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WARNING! This post is only for those of you who want to create an authentic period interior & would like some tips on how to do so. It is not written with the purpose of changing anyone’s mind, tastes, or life decisions.
In DESIGNING Part 1, I talk about my friend who turned her beautiful Arts & Crafts home into a nursery school. She was a wonderful mother with a house full of joyful toddlers who could play freely in their home. I admired her greatly & enjoyed watching her children learn how to move their bodies & interact with the material universe.
My series is written to give anyone a hand with designing anything, be it a home, a party, a special outfit. It is basic art theory that is applicable to anything & everything in life. Art theory is kind of like physics- it is merely an explanation of how we view the material world- lines, colors, shapes, sizes, etc., & how we can make them work together to please us.
It is paramount that your home pleases you. You need to feel that it expresses you & it must be a comforting haven. Me, I like a house that tells a story & I find that decorating with items that might have been chosen by its original owners to please me greatly. If that’s what you like, keep reading. If you would like to choose a different ambience, that’s fine too.
DESIGN IS IN MY BLOOD!
My mother had very definite ideas about interior design. I’m guessing that many of these were learned from her mother who, after growing up on a West Virginia farm, strove to become a woman of culture, refinement & taste .
After a life of milking the cows & slopping the pigs, she left her family at a young age to live in town so she could continue her schooling. Bright & eager, she carefully observed how things were done in her new environment. From the precise placement of silverware to the use correct of candlesticks (no unlit candles allowed!) she absorbed the rules of her new life & passed them onto my mother who taught them to her only daughter. Like my bad knees & an affinity for grammar, I come by my opinions on design honestly.
Here’s Grandma Gordie Elsie in 1922, in her cut silk velvet dress, hair styled in a perfectly Marcelled wave, her daughter, my dear mother, attired in the little silk pongee dress that I still keep in a box & cherish. My uncles, look like solemn, miniature men in their ties & 3-piece suits. The very height of 20’s family chic.
AVOIDING BUNGALOW INTERIOR DESIGN MISTAKES
My mother had her own irrepressible style sense from a very young age & passed this on to me. “Your home reflects you- your tastes, your aspirations, your experiences. You can be inspired by the work of others, but don’t try to be others. Be yourself!”
The constant lesson, “Be yourself.”
When she was in her 90’s, we spend hours wheeling around Stanford Hospital, Ma hooked up to oxygen & a heart monitor, together, marveling at their spectacular art collection. (After her release from the hospital, we amused ourselves by making scathing comments about the “art’ in the skilled nursing center. We were harsh critics!)
Viewed as a fashionista until the end. Her long nails were always bright red & she never left her apartment without makeup.
And she was always her warm, quirky, uncompromising, opinionated unique self.
MOM’S DESIGN RULES
1. Less is more- the idea that a restrained hand creates good design. A major Bungalow Don’t is excessive gewgaws. We are not Victorians!
My grandmother’s early life on the farm was delineated by the concept of less. A family tradition still used by my brother & me today is the Southern holiday greeting of, “Christmas gift!” On the farm, each child would receive one gift- a walnut, an orange, a homemade doll & be joyfully grateful.
By the time my mother was born in 1919, the family was affluent, & my ever-observant grandmother, growing ever more cultured as she attended the theater, visited museums & hob-nobbed with the social elite of her town, had become aware of quality & of the simplicity in good design. A teacher by training & by inclination, she passed these lessons on to my mother. Who passed them on to me.
Re-enforcing these lessons of simplicity, I grew up in the desert of the Southwest with the aesthetics of the Hopi & the Navajo influencing my taste. The desert does not provide anything in abundance & its austere beauty still overwhelms & inspires me. The Craftsman aesthetic melds beautifully with Native American arts & crafts, both using Mother Nature’s gifts in an honest, unadorned manner.
2. Establish your focal point & use every other element to enhance it. Don’t confuse the eye by providing random elements on which to focus. Even with many things to look at, by careful placement, you can guide the eye in the direction you want it to go.
3. No eating in the living room. Oops, that one just slipped in.
4. Lighting is a key element. It directs attention, establishing hierarchies of importance, makes a room functional & establishes mood. Do not create areas of glare. Keep it soft other than where task lighting is required.
One of the most common bungalow interior design mistakes is using lighting fixtures in a modest bungalow that are more suitable in a bungamansion. These pieces will only overwhelm your house, detracting from the lovely features that are there. The Gamble house works because all the pieces enhance one another. The same principle applies in your bungalow.
5. Choose only pieces that you love & treasure. From furniture to textiles to art, better an empty space than the Bungalow Don’t of soulless fillers.
6. The TV does not belong in the living room. However, if you have a small house, you might have no other place for it to sit.
Should this be the case, please do not place that TV above your fireplace. Your fireplace is a key design feature of your room, your whole house, actually. It is very likely clad in an beautiful ornamental tile & flanked by glass-doored cabinets. Perhaps there are windows with divided lites above these cabinets. These are standout period features & plopping your TV smack in the middle will- I’m going to be harsh here-it will waste them.
I visited some friends in a beautiful Craftsman one Christmas & they had the TV hung over the fireplace blaring out a holiday themed program. I was stunned. The electronic images completely took over the living room & dining room, the Christmas tree & the holiday spirit which I so enjoy in an old house. (This is not that house. This is the Hare House with a Photoshopped Santa just so I could pass the trauma of one of my unfavorite bungalow interior design mistakes on to you. Sorry.)
7. Treasure the architectural features of your house. They are what give it its character & charm.
8. Examples of Extreme Bungalow Please Don’ts-
Painting, removing or otherwise harassing your stained woodwork. My DESIGNING series should help you figure out how to brighten your home without doing this.
Removing walls to change the flow of the house. Example: opening the kitchen to the dining room. The layout of your house is a character-defining feature.
Adding decorative/fake materials to make it fancier. Avoid the bungalow interior design mistakes of thinking that the original features of your dear house could be improved. Putting lipstick on your pig will be more effective.
Any changes you make to a house of any period should go in a backward direction, taking it back to its original design.
9. Make sure there are areas in which kids do not have to be careful. Bungalows are family homes & there must be room for the kids to play.
10. Don’t try to make your home so perfect looking that it feels like a hotel. I have a 100 year old Chinese cabinet that is way too large for my current house. I styled it & it hits the eye more pleasingly with the added bits & bobs, but truly, the proportion is still awful.
Too bad. I love that cabinet & if someday I end up in a tiny tiny, old lady space & have to sleep standing up in it, I’ll just learn how to snooze on my feet.
Yes, I know that one person’s bungalow interior design mistakes are another one’s beauty, but, please check out what our good buddy Gustav Stickley had to say about it in his magazine, The Craftsman, to understand my stance.
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Gustav Stickley brought Arts & Crafts to America from Europe in the early 1900’s. He carried with him both the aesthetic & the philosophy of the Movement, & then did it his way, inspired by the simplicity of the log cabin. He was considered to be the leading authority on architecture, gardens & interior design for the Craftsman house. Should you wish to learn more about Stickley, check out these videos that I have collected about him & his work.
In addition to making & selling furniture, he created a monthly magazine, The Craftsman, “An illustrated monthly magazine edited & published by Gustav Stickley in the interests of better art, better work & a better & more reasonable way of living.”
The magazine was a beautiful vehicle for spreading the word about the American Arts & Crafts Movement as well as promoting his furniture & his stores. It contains articles about the English founders of the Movement, John Ruskin & William Morris & was a key influence on the culture from 1901-1916 at which point it merged with another publication, Art World.
There is a wonderful article about the magazine & its contributions here. I strongly urge you to read it because it tells the full tale of how forward thinking, profound & inspiring Stickley’s beliefs & work really were. These lessons are applicable today, perhaps even more so than they were 100 years ago.
Most folks think that the articles in The Craftsman were written by Stickley. Not so. He was a businessman with a large operation to oversee so he employed talented people to create his products & his P.R.
When Stickley founded The Craftsman magazine in 1901, Irene Sargent, an art historian & Syracuse University Professor, wrote nearly all of the first 3 issues & thereafter wrote at least the publication’s lead article as well as serving as managing editor & designing layouts. Her writing & the images she chose, taught the public about the American Arts & Crafts Movement & also its predecessor in Europe & in America.
Between 1901 & 1905, Sargent wrote over 80 articles for The Craftsman, shaping the taste of America. The article below, on interior design for the Craftsman house, is stated as being “Editor’s Notes” in the table of contents for the issue. I am assuming that it was written by her, but it may have been written by Stickley himself. It’s a good introduction to the subject of interior design appropriate to our bungalows. In fact, the article was an introduction to the style for most Americans, being part of the first ever published magazine.
Enjoy!
AN ARGUMENT FOR SIMPLICITY IN HOUSEHOLD FURNISHINGS, by Irene Sargent
In all that concerns household furnishings & decoration, present tendencies are toward a simplicity unknown in the past. The form of any object is made to express the structural idea directly, frankly, often almost ‘with baldness. The materials employed are chosen no longer solely for their intrinsic ‘value, but with a great consideration for their potential beauty. The qualities thus apprehended are traced to their source & then carefully developed by the skill of the craftsman.
In the eighteenth century, the French cabinet makers created charming objects suited to the palaces & castles of the old nobility. They reveled in richness of material: in woods brought from countries & colonies difficult of access; in costly gilding & other applied ornament; in fanciful painting which exquisite delicacy of handling alone saved from triviality & insignificance.
But to-day, with the idea of development everywhere dominant,—in the sciences, in educational methods, in all that furthers human intercourse, comfort & progress—we find the mood of the century impressed upon the material & necessary objects by which we are surrounded. Even our beds, tables & chairs, if planned & executed according to the newer & sounder ideas of household art, offer us a lesson taught by their form, substance & finish. We are no longer tortured by exaggerated lines the reasons for which are past divining. We have not to deal with falsifying veneers, or with disfiguring so-called ornament. We are not necessarily confronted by substances precious because of their traditional use, their rarity, &the difficulty attending their attainment.
We are, first of all, met by plain shapes which not only declare, but emphasize their purpose. Our eyes rest on materials which, gathered from the forests, along the streams, & from other sources familiar to us, are, for that reason, interesting & eloquent. We may, in the arms of our reading-chair, or in the desk before which we pass our working-day, study the sinking undulations in the grain of oak, ash, elm, or other of our native woods, & in so doing, learn the worth of patient, well-directed & skilled labor; of that labor which educates; that is: leads out & develops the hidden Values & qualities of things too often neglected because they are frequently seen.
THE END
Stickley, the father of the America Arts & Crafts Movement, lovingly interpreted our country’s aesthetic in his newly invented medium of the time, the Craftsman style. Should you wish to know more about him, I heartily suggest that you watch the wonderful documentary, Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman.
TIP: Move right along onto Part 1 of this series on interior design for the Craftsman house.
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I adore old appliances & the antique toaster may be at the top of my list. I come by it honestly, being the granddaughter of a West Virginia baker. My grandfather decided to enter the business because he figured that it would be economically stable. People would always eat bread. It was a correct decision that benefited our family for several generations.
The specialty of my family’s bakery was salt rising bread. An Appalachian invention, I cannot but wonder if the recipe made its way from Sara Emmeline, my great-grandmother on the farm, to my grandmother, Gordie Elsie who left the farm as a young girl to become a woman of culture, to the bakery of her new husband. My cousin, whose father took over the bakery from my grandfather & who worked there for many years tells me that, “It was not a big seller unfortunately. Most of it was sold in the outlying small towns, mainly mining communities or communities with lots of old timers that come out of the West Virginia hollows on a Saturday morning to do their shopping in towns like Grant Town, or Fairview or Hundred. Fine folks with discerning tastes.”
We have been eating grains since we were hunter/gathers. We learned to cook them, making gruel, which was easier to digest than the raw seeds, but rather messy. Then we discovered that baking grains into bread was a great deal handier. It grew mold more slowly. You could tote it around & it was tidy. You could eat it with your hands.
When we’re talking about bungalow toasters (That’s kinda what we do here, you know. We talk about bungalows.) we’re talking about pre-electricity for most of the original homeowners.
In 1905, the first filament, Nichrome, a non-magnetic alloy of nickel & chromium was discovered that could repeatedly generate heat to toast bread.
(Let’s do the Time Warp Again!) However, the Hare House, which was built in 1910, was lit by gas & most likely had a wood burning stove so Grace did not use the D-12 to make Alfred’s toast. One option was to use a cast iron skillet. She might have also used a tin contraption that sat on her wood burning stove. This flimsy piece of vented metal held the pieces of bread that you cut from the loaf & offered your fingers no protection against its heat. Tin rusts very easily when exposed to moisture so I can’t imagine that these lasted very long. I had one in my collection for my dreamed of restoration of the Hare House kitchen. I considered trying it out but it was too awful!
In 1919, the year that my mother was born, Charles Strite, a Minnesota mechanic invented the pop-up toaster, the Toastmaster, with both springs & a timer, for restaurant use. He later improved his design & sold it to the general public. You could even twist a little peg to set the toaster for the degree of toasting! Check out my toast videos to hear the timer loudly clicking away at differing speeds, depending on how dark you wanted your toast to be.
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I have never acquired an old house that had its original wood window screens. Makes sense. They are rather flimsy items that have maximum exposure to the elements & over the decades, windows fail & the harnessing of electricity has made it possible to use HVAC systems to cool our houses. Opening windows has fallen out of favor as people have come to believe that a house should be all buttoned up & air tight. And with the abandonment of fresh air has come the abandonment of wood window number tacks.
Invented in 1948, these cute & handy little items were used to mark windows with their matching storm windows in winter or their screens in summer. They are little, very sharp tacks made of a metal alloy with numbers stamped on their heads. The stamping is heavy enough that you can paint & disappear them, but remain legible. A tiny barb under the head ensures that they will stay in place.
Our bungalows are products of old technology. All the wood in our framing, our siding, our shingles, treasured built-ins, a main feature of the character of our homes, our wainscoting was milled by machines, likely powered by steam or coal or sweat. The oldest electric mill that I can find in my research, was in Elk River, Idaho, back in 1912.
The key driver of the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of energy. With this ability to control power, our
When you next admire the beautiful features of your house, consider the part that line shafts & the hard-working people who operated them played. Observe a moment of silence in honor of those who toiled for so little in this cacophony, losing limbs & lives to mill the materials that make your house so beautiful.
WARNING! This post is only for those of you who want to create an authentic period interior & would like some tips on how to do so. It is not written with the purpose of changing anyone’s mind, tastes, or life decisions.
My mother had very definite ideas about interior design. I’m guessing that many of these were learned from her mother who, after growing up on a West Virginia farm, strove to become a woman of culture, refinement & taste .
had her own irrepressible style sense from a very young age & passed this on to me. “Your home reflects you- your tastes, your aspirations, your experiences. You can be inspired by the work of others, but don’t try to be others. Be yourself!”
By the time my mother was born in 1919, the family was affluent, & my ever-observant grandmother, growing ever more cultured as she attended the theater, visited museums & hob-nobbed with the social elite of her town, had become aware of quality & of the simplicity in good design. A teacher by training & by inclination, she passed these lessons on to my mother. Who passed them on to me.
Should this be the case, please do not place that TV above your fireplace. Your fireplace is a key design feature of your room, your whole house, actually. It is very likely clad in an beautiful ornamental tile & flanked by glass-doored cabinets. Perhaps there are windows with divided lites above these cabinets. These are standout period features & plopping your TV smack in the middle will- I’m going to be harsh here-it will waste them.
Gustav Stickley brought Arts & Crafts to America from Europe in the early 1900’s. He carried with him both the aesthetic & the philosophy of the Movement, & then did it his way, inspired by the simplicity of the log cabin. He was considered to be the leading authority on architecture, gardens & interior design for the Craftsman house. Should you wish to learn more about Stickley, check out 
Most folks think that the articles in The Craftsman were written by Stickley. Not so. He was a businessman with a large operation to oversee so he employed talented people to create his products & his P.R.
In all that concerns household furnishings & decoration, present tendencies are toward a simplicity unknown in the past. The form of any object is made to express the structural idea directly, frankly, often almost ‘with baldness. The materials employed are chosen no longer solely for their intrinsic ‘value, but with a great consideration for their potential beauty. The qualities thus apprehended are traced to their source & then carefully developed by the skill of the craftsman.
We are, first of all, met by plain shapes which not only declare, but emphasize their purpose. Our eyes rest on materials which, gathered from the forests, along the streams, & from other sources familiar to us, are, for that reason, interesting & eloquent. We may, in the arms of our reading-chair, or in the desk before which we pass our working-day, study the sinking undulations in the grain of oak, ash, elm, or other of our native woods, & in so doing, learn the worth of patient, well-directed & skilled labor; of that labor which educates; that is: leads out & develops the hidden Values & qualities of things too often neglected because they are frequently seen.