(We are standing in the kitchen of the Hans Herr House.) The fireplace has a raised hearth, or cook top, about two feet in height above the floor level, that takes up about one-half of the fireplace. In one corner of the fireplace, a bed of coals was developed. When it was time to cook, coals were scooped up and placed on the hearth under a trivet. By the amount of the coals and the height of the trivet, one could have a low, medium, or high "burner". The raised hearth was a German innovation (as compared to the English), which had two big advantages over cooking on the floor of the fireplace. It was much easier on the back. It also tended to keep the floor length skirts which women wore out of the fire. Because the space heating was done within the stube where the flame was separated from the people doing the cooking, the whole design helped to make cooking a more pleasant experience.
The kitchen is also a hallway. Stairs lead to the upper floors and down to basement, or root cellar. Doorways lead to a small bedroom in back of the kitchen and to the great room across the front of the house. Food was prepared in the kitchen but eaten in the great room. When the Herrs sat down to the table there were twelve of them, two grandparents, two parents, and eight children. But let's leave the kitchen and go to the small bedroom in back.
One of the things that we know is that every room in the house was multipurpose. We have the estate inventory of Christian Herr made in 1750. From this we are able to reconstruct the placement of items about the house. Though it is a surprise at first, we find that a horse saddle and a crosscut saw were stored in the large (master) bedroom. There is a certain logic in this as it would be the safest place and the driest place on the farm. Likewise with the small bedroom; it was used to store food to be used in the next few days, and tools. Some of the tools to be found on a farm would include a scythe and a flail. The scythe(s) would be used during the summer when the grains and hay were harvested. Threshing did not occur at this time. The grain was stored in the barn and it was threshed during the winter, perhaps over the course of several weeks. The flail was used for knocking the grain out of the head.
Going back through the kitchen, we can enter the great room. The dominant feature of the room is the stube, the heating element. The best visualization is a bake oven which is fired from the fireplace in the kitchen. This stube protrudes into the great room and would have made the room quite cozy. Around three sides of the room, there a permanent bench against the wall. By removing whatever furniture the family would have been using and adding benches, the seating capacity of the room could become quite large. (On a recent Saturday, I had forty-five people in the room while I talked to them.) In this way, the room became a meeting room for worship services.
The great room is currently furnished with a table on which is located an object that was a prized possession of Christian Herr.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.