Christmas in Taconic: 1948

Editor’s note: Taconic is one of the villages of the town of Salisbury. It includes the Twin Lakes section and was the site of the estate of the Scoville family.

I was only 19 months old for my  first Christmas in Taconic, so I don’t remember much about it. Most of my recollections come from later visits, as stories were told and retold.

Fortunately, my father was an avid amateur photographer and recorded that monumental first with a snapshot. It shows my paternal family gathered in the kitchen of the small house my grandparents occupied, next to the Scoville carriage house on Taconic Road.

My grandfather was a chauffeur and joined the staff at the Scoville estate when he accepted a postion working for Herbert Scoville in 1920. He was only supposed to be a summer replacement, but he ended up staying for the rest of his life.

A widower when he came to Taconic, he married another staff member, Suzanne Magnusson, in the mid-1920s. Suzanne, known to all as “Susie,� was a good cook, a fact that many present-day Taconic inhabitants still recall, as she cooked for a number of other families in the area over the years.

The most impressive feature of Susie’s kitchen was an immense black cast-iron coal stove. As a child I was fascinated by all of its intricate details. It had lots of doors, levers and handles and of course the handle for lifting the many lids on the stove top.

It also had a crank handle that was used to shake the fire down whenever it was time to add more coal.

The house in East Hartford where I lived at the time had a gas stove, which was completely uninteresting compared to that coal stove.

The coal stove was also useful for disposing of table scraps, peelings and stray bits of paper. You simply opened the grate and threw them into the fire. I really loved getting a chance to toss things in there and watching as they disappeared in a dramatic puff of flame.

The kitchen stove was not the only one in the house. The house was heated entirely by coal in those days so there were two other stoves in use in winter. The other two rooms on the first floor each had a coal stove that heated both the room it stood in and the one above it through a register in the ceiling.

Those two stoves disappeared in the summer (I never knew where they went) but reappeared when the fall heating season began. The one in the living room was light brown enameled cast iron. It had two sets of doors, one behind the other, that could be opened to adjust the amount of heat the stove provided.

Opening the outer doors revealed inner doors with isinglass (mica) panels in them. This allowed the radiant heat of the fire to escape into the room and provided instant warmth to anyone sitting there.

The living room was especially cozy at Christmas time as the window shutters were closed to keep out the New England weather, making the room seem smaller.

The Christmas dinner menu varied over the years, but in 1948 it was turkey with Susie’s special stuffing. Other years it would be roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, which was one of my favorites.

I was treated to many meals in that kitchen over the years, but somehow those Christmas visits stand out more vividly than the others. Perhaps it was the spirit of the season.

Or perhaps it was that coal stove.