Among
the artifacts which, here and there, still dot the landscape of the land I love
and speak to me over the unfolding years, are the spring houses and root
cellars of an age and a state of mind fast disappearing in the rear-view mirror
of “progress”. Because I will always be a “country person” at heart, I am
easily moved by reminders of the provident people from whose solid roots my
very DNA flows.
As a young farm kid, I felt a
special bond with the regiment of squirrels which foraged the ancient butternut
trees that lined a long-deserted roadway on a remote hillside of our Vermont
farm. Just before the prized, but hard
to crack nuts were ready to harvest for our family’s larder, I would find my
tree-leaping competitors had already begun to fill every niche in the nearby
field-stone wall in anticipation of the long cold months ahead. (In the end I
learned that purloining some of their harvest was easier than climbing or
shaking the nut-loaded trees!)
I mention those far-sighted
squirrels because their forward-thinking attributes seem to be a metaphor emblematic
of the very concept of provident living which has underlined the way I have
wished to live my own life; and certainly those who came before me and the way
they did live their lives.
Our family root cellar occupied the
far northwest corner of the stone-sided and dirt-floored space beneath the old
farmhouse itself. As winter approached, we filled its wooden bins with Green
Mountain potatoes dug from the Bear Hill acres, Wolf River, Northern Spy, Red
Astrachan and Winesap apples from the orchard, sand-packed carrots, beets and
parsnips from the garden, and late cabbages just nipped by frost and hung by their
roots from overhead beams. Stoneware crocks held dill pickles, sauerkraut and
salt pork. Linen-wrapped-and-wax-coated wedges of handcrafted farmhouse cheese
aged atop foundation stones in a dryer corner, and a hundred pounds or so of
Hubbard squash went to the warmer attic room two floors above.
At the far end of our unheated
woodshed, where ten cords of hand-split maple, beech and birch were stacked
high, our “Keeping Room’s” paper-lined shelves held the cut-and-wrapped
remnants of two Berkshire hogs, including dry-cured hams and
corn-cob-and-maple-smoked slabs of bacon. Head-cheese sausage (not my favorite)
also hung there, along with other meat products which needed to be kept frozen
Another feature of the Home Place
was the Spring House, where ice-cold water piped underground from a hillside
spring a quarter-mile away filled both a large trough from which buckets of
water would be carried to the livestock in the nearby barn, and a milk house
where the ten-gallon cans of each day’s farm product awaited transport to the
butter churns of a Boston creamery. Like most farms of the era, that was also
where our own jugs of milk, cream and butter would stay fresh in shallow, cold
running spring water. On warm summer days, the spring house was also home to
buckets of wild blackberries, strawberries and raspberries waiting to be culled
and deployed to a myriad of delicious destinations. (We bottled garden and
field produce ferociously!)
In our present southern Utah log
home, the first space to be “finished off” was the in-house “root cellar” in
the northwest corner of the basement. Underground, insulated, with outdoor
air-circulation incorporated into the design, it is still a work-in-process,
with challenges to be resolved in a climate very different than that of our New
England heritage, but filled with the promise of living the “provident” life those
long-ago squirrels taught us.
A northern New Jersey hillside root cellar is a
classic example of the type prized by farm families of the past and still to be found in America’s
northeast; especially in Amish country.
In the years before household refrigerators, a
“spring house” like this one would have played an important role in keeping fresh dairy products
cold.
Unheated “keeping rooms” enabled country
families to protect cured meats and cheeses during the aging process, a matter especially important to
immigrant families wishing to preserve old world
food
traditions.
. 
Posts
