Old Coal Furnace

The house I lived in for 18 years as a kid was built in 1904. It had an entire room in the basement for coal. The room had a Dutch door to the basement and an outside window where the coal truck would load the room from floor to ceiling every fall. We would open the top of the door to access coal early in winter and when it dropped to the level of the bottom door we would open it to shovel coal out the bottom. My job was to haul buckets of coal ashes out to the alley behind the house. Grandpa or dad would bank-up the furnace late in the evening to keep the house warm through the night. Later on we changed to a stoker system. The coal was in a small briquette style and there was a machine that fed coal into the furnace to keep the temperature at a more even level overnight.