psing of these wooden back-bars. The
destruction of a dinner sometimes was attended with the loss of a life.
Later the back-bars were made of iron. On them were hung iron hooks or
chains with hooks of various lengths called pothooks, trammels, hakes,
pot-hangers, pot-claws, pot-clips, pot-brakes, pot-crooks. Mr. Arnold
Talbot, of Providence, Rhode Island, has folding trammels, nine feet
long, which were found in an old Narragansett chimney heart. Gibcrokes
and recons were local and less frequent names, and the folks who in
their dialect called the lug-pole a gallows-balke called the pothooks
gallows-crooks. On these hooks pots and kettles could be hung at varying
heights over the fire. The iron swinging-crane was a Yankee invention of
a century after the first settlement, and it proved a convenient and
graceful substitute for the back-bar.

Some Dutch houses had an adaptation of a Southern method of housekeeping
in the use of a detached house called a slave-kitchen, where the meals
of the negro house and farm servants were cooked and served. The
slave-kitchen of the old Bergen homestead stood unaltered till within a
few years on Third Avenue in Brooklyn. It still exists in a dismantled
condition. Its picture plainly shows the stone ledges within the
fireplace, the curved iron lug-pole, and hanging pothooks and trammels.
With ample fire of hickory logs burning on the hearthstone, and the
varied array of primitive cooking-vessels steaming with savory fare, a
circle of laughing, black faces shining with the glowing firelight and
hungry anticipation, would make a "Dutch interior" of American form and
shaping as picturesque and artistic as any of Holland. The fireplace
itself sometimes went by the old English name, clavell-piece, as shown
by the letters of John Wynter, written from Maine in 1634 to his English
home. "The Chimney is large, with an oven at each end of him: he is so
large that wee can place our Cyttle within the Clavell-piece. Wee can
brew and bake and boyl our Cyttle all at once in him." Often a large
plate of iron, called the fire-back or fire-plate, was set at the back
of the chimney, where the constant and fierce fire crumbled brick and
split stone. These iron backs were often cast in a handsome design.

In New York the chimneys and fireplaces were Dutch in shape; the
description given by a woman traveller at the end of the seventeenth
century ran thus:--

"The chimney-places are very droll-like: the