Walking the alleys of Lafayette Square, I came upon this old coal chute door in the side of a building.
Closer inspection yielded some specifics on its origin.
A nifty 1928 Majestic coal window, style M-101.
Through the magic of the internet, we can identify the exact catalog the M-101 came from.
And here’s a view you don’t get from the alley!
Why would anyone settle for less than certified malleable iron?
The story of burning rocks at home
St. Louis homes were first heated by fireplaces burning wood. In the 1880s, coal surpassed wood as the nation’s primary fuel source. From 1906 through 1920, coal provided three quarters of the nation’s energy, and half as late as 1949.
In the early 1920s, homes began moving to central heating. Burning coal provided the heat for steam or hot water boilers. Half a winter’s supply was usually delivered to a home, perhaps through their Majestic M-101 coal door. Oil heaters first appeared in this era, but coal remained king.
Coal carts, replaced by coal trucks, delivered large quantities of Illinois bituminous (or soft) coal to the basements of area residences.
Back then, coal trucks were on the move citywide. The coal man pulled out a chute, secured it onto his truck and pushed it into a house’s basement window. The coal spilled down to a cellar bin.
Coal is outright dirty, and the dust or soot got everywhere. It often rendered basements unusable for anything but coal storage. However, the few alternatives available included fireplaces, stoves, and kerosene heaters; none a real improvement.
A part time job for the household
Homeowners shoveled coal from bin to bucket and fed it into the furnace. The home heating process often began with starting a wooden kindling fire, necessary to ignite the coal. Once started, the coal fire produced an intense heat.
A coal fired furnace required active management. One had to follow a schedule for adding coal to the furnace and tending the fire. By shovel or bucket, the homeowner had to periodically feed more fuel to the fire.
Having the furnace fire go out was a distressing thing on a frigid day. Maintaining heat late at night could be especially challenging.
The homeowner had to actively tend to the fire, and keep it ‘banked.’ Opening the furnace door; he or she would shake the cinders through grates while adding fresh coal to the furnace. The coal burned more slowly as a result, enabling a small fire to burn through the night. This kept the home reasonably warm. If not properly banked, the fire could go out and have to be restarted from scratch.
In tough times, or if the coal ran out, people would substitute what they could. Fences and stairways would occasionally disappear.
The ashes also had to be collected and carried outside to be hauled away by the ashman.
While dirty, at least homes heating with coal were unaffected by power line failures. The use of coal brought with it combustible soot buildup in chimneys and smokestacks. Hence, chimney sweeps. It also caused colorless and odorless gases like CO2, SO2 and NOx to fill homes. Families owed their survival to the drafty nature of early construction. Still, coal remained a reliable and reasonably priced source of home heating into the 1950s.
The building of King Coal in St. Louis
An infrastructure developed to ship, store, sell and distribute coal around the city. Dozens of companies dedicated themselves to bringing coal to your door.
With coal both cheap and plentiful, St. Louis burned mountains of it. The black smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys hung like a pall in the city’s winter air. It coated the limestone and brick exteriors of buildings.
You can still see the results of years of smoke on some of Lafayette Square’s pink granite, like this example:
From 1937 to 39, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen looked for ways to reduce the pollution caused by burning coal. Politicians were torn between competing interests – public health vs household economy and healthy local business. It didn’t help a bit that St. Louis sits in the middle of a phenomenal belt of mostly bituminous coal.
Too much of an easy thing
The situation demanded action following a weird windless day in which visibility in the city disappeared, even at midday. November 28,1939 is remembered as Black Tuesday.
On the left is a photo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, during the afternoon of November 28th. Next to it is a photo from the same perspective one year later. These were used to call attention to the improvement created by St.Louis’s smoke ordinance. Hard to believe that someone would want a cigarette on such a smoggy day in 1938, but there it is.
This event, followed shortly by several others forced city hall into shifting coal resources from soft Illinois to hard (anthracite) Arkansas coal.
Despite a locally improved situation, the 1940 US census revealed that 75% of American homes still heated with wood or coal.
As the Mississippi Valley Fuel Company’s pipeline neared completion in the late 1940s, Laclede Gas offered natural gas fuel to those in St. Louis who could afford to install a gas-burning furnace. By this time, inexpensive thermostats and fans enabled average new homes to incorporate forced air heating with gas. In the homebuilding boom that followed World War II, coal heat for homes was considered obsolete.
Big coal attempts a rally
In 1949, 63 local coal retailers banded together to form the Coal Heating Service of St. Louis. This coordinated efforts to keep coal the king of residential heating.
The combine worked to portray coal as a nature-friendly part of everyday life, while reminding the homeowner to lock in a big supply long before the next heating season.
By 1960, coal was still the primary means of electric generation in the US, but generally distributed from the giant boilers and turbines of utilities to area homes. In 2020, US utilities burned nearly a billion tons of coal for electricity.
Currently, the ash from spent coal amounts to well over 100 million tons per year in this country alone. It concentrates mercury, cadmium and arsenic. Some of the ash is repurposed into products like wallboard and concrete. A lot of it is used for landfill, or discharged into ponds and waterways. Coal ash is not considered hazardous waste by the US EPA.
The EPA, not immune to the influence of a powerful coal lobby, features a full page on the benefits of ash reuse, but nothing on the health risks posed by coal ash dumping. A sobering counter point of view is available from the Physicians for Social Responsibility, whose website is listed below.
Epilogue
Trees eventually die and rot, while the weight of years compresses the carbon in them. Coal forms over millennia, sequestering energy the trees once held. Digging up the coal and setting it on fire releases that energy. It’s really not much of a trick, but man has been performing it for a couple of thousand years.
Technology now allows us to economically mine the regenerative energy of the sun, the tides, the wind and the earth itself. It doesn’t come to the front of our minds because the burning now takes place outside the city, where ‘scrubbers’ remove the soot from the smoke. Greenhouse gas emissions and questionable ash disposal remain troubling issues. Setting fire to coal today seems a rather neolithic response to feeling chilly.
References and Credits
Physicians for Social Responsibility – https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-hazardous-to-human-health.pdf
Lots of photos of St. Louis in the coal smoke at https://www.stltoday.com/news/archives/nov-28-1939-the-day-black-tuesday-rolled-into-st-louis/article_00c3b6cd-ba69-5a19-b498-fbc29f9630c4.html
Historical Statistics of the United States, 1957, US Department of Commerce, p.355. for background of coal usage in the US.
The News Air Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration; Nov 6 2001; John R Hall
https://www.achrnews.com/articles/87039-the-1930s-passing-the-torch-from-coal-to-oil-heat
Philadelphia Tribune ; Alonzo Kittrels; Jan 6 2018
https://www.onehourheatandair.com/articles/expert-tips/boilers/a-brief-history-of-home-heating/
“Back in the Day: Heating with coal was reliable but laborious” Philadelphia Tribune Alonzo Kittrels Jan 6 2018
https://www.oldhouseweb.com/blog/the-history-of-coal-heating/ Bill Kibbel
EPA source for current coal at https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics
Another essay of mine deals in greater detail with the smoke problem in St Louis, and the reaction of John Albury Bryan of Lafayette Square. You can see it here:
I enjoyed this information. My family lived At 916 Allen, 4 family flat. I remember as a little girl (from about 1945-46 to 1950) we had coal delivered to our 1st floor, 3 room “shotgun” house. Each room had a floor register for heat. About 1949-50 there was a fire in the basement in the furnace & coal room. After that we had to get an oil furnace that sat in front room. I can sfill remember that fire shooting up from the floor register.
There was “LUMP” coal which could more easily burn for longer periods but you had to put it in . Chipped coal was easier to load by the shovel full into the stokers which sat in front of the firebox doors . But they required electricity to operate the worm gear which turned chipped coal into the fire box and ran a noisy blower motor which blew air onto the fires making them hotter for a few minutes to keep the whole operation going . Then , there were the “KLINKERS” – compressed ash , chunks of it with sharp hardness . No. 10 Benton Place had a gravity hot water furnace system which required no electricity in earlier days – hot water ran up in pipes , then cooled and ran down again . When we got the house on a lease the Ash Man had long gone !
The clinkers built up in the huge basement til a modern gas conversion burner and pump were installed by Mickey Gaines – the champion of old style retro-fits in the early days of the 1970s . Great man . The smells of the coal sulphur was evocative of old times – sentiment raising .
Awesome job Mike
Really enjoyed it
Rob
Thanks! Good article!
We had that coal door on the side of our house. We used a potbelly stove to burn coal in the middle room between bedroom and hallway. Taking out the ashes and bring in wood chip as a fire starter was my job.
Excellent article. I am a child of the 1940s and lived in a three-story (Triple-decker) apartment in the Dorchester section of Boston. I remember the noisy coal deliveries to our basement bin and the routine surrounding maintaining the furnace, banking, shoveling, etc. Can you tell me what was the average cost to fill a coal bin in the late 1940s?
Thank you.
Thanks for your email, Stephen. I guess the cost to fill a bin would be dependent on the size of the bin. As far as the standard cost, in 1949, the price of a ton of coal was $32.05. That’s according to the US DOE. For comparison, a ton in 2005 was only $19.43. Both prices are in year 2000 dollars.