No, not Charcoal Briquettes
When most of us think of charcoal, we think of fuel for a modern barbecue, but charcoal has been made since Roman times and has had a number of uses.
Charcoal is made from the controlled burning of wood, but has advantages over burning wood directly. Charcoal burns hotter, cleaner, and more evenly than wood, and is lighter. It was especially important for the iron industry. To smelt iron and get a good quality product, a very hot and carefully controlled fire is needed. Until after the Civil War, charcoal was the primary fuel for iron works. It is estimated that a typical blast furnace of 1850 would need 270,000 bushels of charcoal per year, equivalent to 225 acres of timber.
Troy had a major iron industry. The Burden Iron Works in South Troy was mostly powered by its world-famous water wheel, but would have needed charcoal as well. Other iron-smelting companies would have used charcoal, as well as any other industry needing a very hot fire. Most homeowners also used charcoal in combination with wood for heat and cooking before the prevalence of coal.
D.A. Judson and Company Coal Dealers
Company Office at First Avenue above 118th Street.
Charcoal-making is a forest industry, agricultural in the sense that the crop harvested was trees. It was particularly suited to the eastern sections of Rensselaer County: beginning at Sand Lake, northeast to East Poestenkill, then south to the mountains of Stephentown, through Taberton and Alps. The area was hilly and heavily forested, with much of its area not suitable for farming. The need for charcoal waned after the Civil War, when coke began to be used in blast furnaces and coal for heat and cooking in homes instead, but the industry persisted in Rensselaer County through the first quarter of the 20th century.
A lot of charcoal was made in the wintertime. Only live trees were used, and it was best to cut them in the winter when the sap was mostly in the roots. It was also easier to transport cut logs by sleigh than by wagon. At the Mattison Hollow charcoal operation in South Berlin in the 1890s, wood was transported to the kilns by a two-car railway, operated by gravity. The photograph illustrating this post is in summertime, so the use of the train may have made the work easier in the summer. Wood chopping was good off-season work for farmers, some of whom harvested trees from their own land and made charcoal on a small scale. A good woodchopper was expected to cut three cords a day; a cord is a stack of wood four feet wide and high by eight feet long. Iron makers preferred charcoal made from hard wood.
Before the Civil War, charcoal was made using an ancient method by stacking wood in a precise way, sometimes in a pit, then covering it with earth. Even when there was no pit dug, the place where charcoal was made was often called a pit. The wood was stacked in a 30-40’ diameter mound, leaving a space one foot in diameter in the center as a chimney. The wood would be carefully and tightly stacked ten to fourteen feet high in the center. Thirty cords of wood, a one-acre woodlot, could fit. There were three to 3-6” vent holes all around the base, which would be opened and closed as needed. It would take one week to char the wood, with almost constant attention needed to make sure that all was going well. This method was difficult to control and produced relatively weak charcoal.
After the Civil War, commercial charcoal kilns were made of bricks or stone. In this era they were generally round, 28-30’ in diameter at the base and 12-16’ high at the center. Some had vertical walls, others had walls that stepped in toward the top, where there was a center vent 3-5’ in diameter, lined with a heavy cast iron ring. There was a door at the base to load the wood and many vents all around the base, which would be open at the start of firing then closed as needed. Once filled with 40-50 cords of wood, the kiln was ignited at the center with a long-handled torch, often at night, so the progress of the fire could be better monitored. For the first four days, white smoke came from the vents, the water boiling out of the wood. Then there was blue smoke, a sign that charring was almost complete. All the vents would be closed to suffocate the fire. After five or six days, the kiln would be cool and could be emptied of about 50 bushels of charcoal per cord of wood.
The 1870 US census lists at least ten men in Stephentown with the occupation “collier,” that is, charcoal maker. The Rensselaer County Directory of the same year lists James Culver as a wood and charcoal dealer and farmer, and his brother David as a charcoal burner and farmer. Nathaniel Gardner of South Stephentown was a lumber and charcoal dealer and farmer; and William Wheeler of West Stephentown was a farmer and charcoal burner. As all of the men were also farmers, charcoal making was a sideline.
A couple of articles in the Troy Daily Times in 1885 indicate that there was some larger-scale charcoal making in Rensselaer County. Bailey Brothers in Stephentown were building new kilns. The charcoal business was good, but the price low. In February 1885, the paper noted that S.M. Malty’s charcoal works closed operations last week, with 96 carloads of charcoal shipped from the train station since last April 1st, each car with 1150 bushels of charcoal. A bushel weighed twenty pounds.
According to an article in the Troy Daily Times on October 21, 1914, any “mountaineer” with a wood lot was also a charcoal maker at least part time. The cost — from cutting the timber, hauling it to the pit, building the pit, to burning the wood was 5 cents — and a two-horse load drawn from the pit to the city, containing 150 bushels, brought $22.50 at 15 cents per bushel. This implies that the old method of pit burning of charcoal persisted among individual makers of charcoal in the Rensselaer County hills long after the Civil War.
The charcoal makers would make one sales trip per week. Every Sunday night, they loaded up their wagons and traveled from Stephentown and Alps to Sand Lake, then to Troy and Albany. Early on Monday morning, the “coal burners” (that is charcoal burners) sold their product. Many had regular customers throughout the cities, both homes and restaurants. By noon, the charcoal was delivered. The sellers did their weekly shopping and headed for home.
Of course, extensive charcoal making resulted in deforestation. It would take twenty years for trees to regrow enough for the same area to be used again for charcoal production. Much of the forest has now regrown in the charcoal-producing areas of the county.
By 1914, the charcoal industry was waning, though older citizens may remember locally-made charcoal for sale at their neighborhood groceries in Troy in the 1950s. The bag of charcoal illustrating this post is from Frank M. Wheeler Coal Company. Wheeler was a coal and wood dealer in Troy from about 1895. He died in 1935, but the company was in business until about 1965. The ad illustrating this post dates from 1961.
Blog post and research by Schaghticoke Town Historian and HCM Trustee, Christina S. Kelly
Note: The bulk of the information for this post came from 200 Years of Soot and Sweat by Victor Rolando, 1992. Rolando was the Rensselaer County Historian in the 1970s.