This would be the kitchen where Mrs. Van Slate would have made the meals to serve to the borders in the dining room.
Kitchen Highlights
Listed below are a few of the items in this room that you may be interested in learning more about.
Kitchen Stove
The main piece of equipment that each household needs, the very first thing that they would start with, would have had to be the wood cook stove. That not only helped heat the house, it cooked the food, it baked the bread, it heated the water, even heated your irons for ironing clothes. So it is without a doubt the number one most important piece of equipment and we have a real admiration for the ladies back then because they had to know how much wood to put in the firebox, for example to bake bread, Don’t know the exact figures, but say it takes 350 degrees for an hour. They needed to know how much wood to put in, whether the wood was green or dry, what specie it was to know how much heat that was going to generate. Although the stove is placed on this wall, you can see the pie plate on the outside wall. In older homes, if you look up on the walls and see a pie plate that usually shows where the stove or another wood-burning unit was because that's where the chimney would be.
Rhinelander Refrigerator
The second thing to note in the kitchen is the refrigerator. Actually an icebox or some might call it a cooler. This unit was made by the Rhinelander Refrigerator Company, a company that was in business from 1902 to 1935. They made these insulated boxes that you put a block of ice in and it would keep your food cold or at least cool. They came in many varieties, exterior of wood or this fancier porcelain, as this one happens to have. You could get them made like this with the ice chamber on the right side or you could have it mirrored with the ice chamber on the left. You could get it with a sliding door on the side of the ice chamber on the back and then you could mate with a door in your house wall. Many older homes have these little doors, I've seen used early on for milk delivery and more recently probably mail delivery but they also were used in some homes for ice delivery. So when the Iceman came he would not have to come in the house he could simply open the door slide open the door on your refrigerator and slide the chunk of ice right in.
Note the Drip Pan under the Refrigerator. As the ice melted, it was caught in a pan and it was a very typical chore for the children to empty it.
