Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country

4. Acquiring Conveniences: Water, Heat, and Light

Acquiring Conveniences Water, Heat, and Light The house that Joseph and Antonia Putrich rented from the Champion Copper Company came equipped with cold running water, but that was its only convenience. The kitchen was located in a shed-roofed, tar-papered addition on the rear of the house, where water would have been heated on the cooking stove. Another stove, probably located in the dining room, heated the rest of the house, fueled by wood likely cut by Joseph Putrich on company lands. Out back were a number of outbuildings, including a privy and a chicken coop. Furnishing each company house with a bathtub was deemed unnecessary because public baths were located in the basement of Painesdale’s library. Nor was the house equipped with electricity; the Putriches used oil lamps and candles.1 Conveniences such as running water, indoor toilets, central heat, and electric lights make an enormous difference in how people live in a house. People use rooms differently , depending on the light and heat sources. The convenience of having water, toilets, and heating fuel indoors, rather than out in the yard, affected circulation routes through the space. They also affected domestic labor—usually the work of women, who bore the burden of carrying water, emptying chamber pots, tending stoves and heaters, fueling and cleaning lamps. Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s groundbreaking work on domestic technology pointed out that the acquisition of new technologies did not always mean less work for the women of the house; it just changed the nature of that work.2 But what bears examination is how and why these new technologies were acquired and, particularly in the case of the indoor toilet, where it was located. To some extent, the story of adopting domestic technologies is the story of bringing yard functions indoors. Rather than water reaching a pump in the yard, or a hydrant down the street, it was now available from a faucet at the kitchen sink. Rather than going outside to the woodpile, residents fed furnaces with coal that had been dumped into cellars. Rather than a privy in the backyard, an indoor 128 4 toilet saved that trip. Even later technologies, beyond the scope of this book, maintained the same pattern: laundry is no longer scrubbed in washtubs outside, or in the wash house in the backyard, but is now done in a machine indoors. And only occasionally is laundry dried outside on a line any more; it is dried in a machine indoors. This shift of functions not only changed how the house was used but also how the yard was used. Yards were able to be devoted to lawns and gardens, both floral and vegetable. Work and Play in the Yard This discussion of conveniences begins, then, with the yard, and for this we return to the Putriches’, which is well documented (Figure 4.1). The Putriches’ yard was 129 Acquiring Conveniences Figure 4.1 Putrich house, Seeberville, photographed 1913. The tall pole in the Putriches’ yard supported a suspended ball used to play a type of bowling. The privy and sheds are visible in the backyard. Courtesy of Archives of Michigan. Figure 4.2 Unidentified yard, probably Painesdale, photographed early twentieth century. Backyard sheds appear to have been made of scavenged materials and might have housed a cow, chickens, and ducks. Courtesy of Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections. hard-packed earth. No plants were visible, even in midAugust photographs, except for some flowerpots on a window sill. Measuring about 40 by 60 feet, the Putriches’ was on the small side of yards in the Copper Country; Bureau of Labor Statistics investigator Walter Palmer found that yards were generally 50 by 100 feet. Just one mine offered yards as narrow as 25 feet, and several were much larger. Like most yards, the Putriches’ was enclosed by a variety of fencing—vertical sticks, horizontal planks, and a few pickets. Copper Range apparently did not build fences for its tenants. Neither did Quincy until 1918, when General Manager Lawton argued that it was to help the workers care for their “war gardens.” Calumet & Hecla provided fences; horizontal board fences appear in many photographs of C&H houses, in contrast to the picket fences that surround schools and managers’ houses. Beginning in 1927, at the urging of landscape architect Warren Manning, C&H removed domestic fences and replaced them with barberry bushes to lower maintenance costs and improve the appearance...