Heating and cooking in rural Canada: home energy in transition, 1850–1940

Abstract

ABSTRACTContextualized in very recent histories of energy and in the rich scholarly literature focused on the consumption practices within the home, this article examines the ways that rural Canadians experienced the shift from the organic energy regime (characterized by relatively low energy use and reliance on local rural environments) to the mineral energy regime of fossil fuels and electricity (characterized by high energy use, dense population clusters, and complex networks that distribute energy). Modern grid-supplied energy came very late to rural Canada; the great majority of rural Canadians were still relying on kerosene (paraffin) for lighting and wood for heating and cooking as late as 1941. This article focuses on rural Canadians' long reliance on the wood stove to explore the distinctively slow and late transition that characterized the Canadian transition to the modern energy regime. Although the cast iron wood-burning stove eventually became as emblematic of the ‘backwardness’ of rural life as the coal-oil lamp, the author argues that the wood stove, like the coal oil lamp, was in fact a product of the modern energy regime, and was entangled in networks of extraction, processing, and transportation of fossil fuels along modern coal-and steam networks already transforming rural life.