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This was part of a project sponsored in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Council for the Humanities About three cords worth of hardwood logs were required for this program. A small party of volunteers had sawed the logs into 30 inch lengths and split them into "billets" (four to seven inches wide) and "lapwood" (one to four inches wide), in preparation for the building of a 19th century charcoal hearth, the centerpiece of an event held on the property April 24th and 25th.The hearth was constructed out of the wood itself, all of which would hopefully turn into charcoal. The outer skin of leaves and dirt were left off to enable participants in the program to complete the hearth themselves during the event. |
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| To begin the program, Tom drove his little draft horse, Gulliver, down to the side of the hearth where participants had gathered. Gulliver was hitched to a logging sled that was loaded with split billets. |  Gulliver and Tom with the logging sled designed to move easily over frozen ground. |
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| Tom explained the particulars of
the wood used, and the special requirements for splitting and sawing. He
then gave a brief history of charcoaling, an art and science at least as
old as the bronze age. He brought this up to the last century
when the Richmond Ironworks hired "colliers" to make charcoal
on the Bidwell House property to help to satisfy the great demand fuel in the making of iron.
Taking a closer look at the highly ordered pile of wood referred to as the charcoal hearth or "pit" (an archaic term based on an earlier technology, as there is no hole whatsoever dug in the process) Tom confessed that this was a scale model. He didn't have the time or skill to build a pit like those used by the Richmond Ironworks. Pits of historical dimensions, composed of twenty-five to fifty cords of wood, would have seriously dwarfed Tom's conical hearth, which was only about seven feet tall with a diameter of about twelve feet. |
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Then Tom demonstrated the whole building procedure, showing how a triangular chimney of thin sticks was stacked around a pole stuck in the ground. Billets, placed snug together and stood on end with a slight lean, radiated out from the chimney. A second tier of billets sat on top of the first. A shoulder of smaller wood rounded off the top. Lapwood filled in the larger gaps between billets, especially around the sides. The chimney was filled with dry kindling. | ||
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Most participants took a hand in tossing on the layer of leaves, and shoveling on the outer covering of dirt. On Saturday evening the Bidwell House presented a lecture by industrial archaeologist Victor Rolando at the Monterey Meeting House. Mr. Rolando reiterated much of the information about the history of charcoal making that had been covered in the day's program, but in greater detail. He related many particulars about the Richmond Ironworks and other bygone furnace operations. An extensive slide show was used to demonstrate how archaeology uses evidence as found in remains to discover the activity of the past. |
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 Sunday morning, Tom ascended his "collier's ladder" (a split log with foot steps carved out) and dropped a shovel load of burning charcoal into the top of the chimney as a new set of participants looked on. |
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| He then capped the chimney with split wood and replaced the leaf and dirt cover which had been raked back from the top. Once more the history and technology of the making of charcoal was interpreted as it had been the day before. The hearth smoked beautifully. Eventually, many days after the program, quality hardwood charcoal would be raked out of the hearth. | |||
